The ice lances hit the carapace and exploded into powder.
Not cracked. Not embedded. Just — gone. Thousands of crystals drifting in the morning light like flower petals, leaving nothing behind but faint white scratches on armor that had clearly weathered far worse.
Liora stared at what was left of her Ice Spear volley.
*So that’s a fifth-rank demon.*
There was no time to process it.
— *Clang. Cling.* —
The Daybright Aegis blazed gold as Divine Obstruction locked onto the demon’s first foreleg strike. The impact rang like a temple bell — enormous, resonant, the kind of sound that travels through bone. Leo’s feet held. His body held. The golden light dispersed the force exactly as it was designed to.
But his pupils contracted.
The demon’s raw striking power was something he hadn’t calculated for. His internal energy had cleared 1,600 — putting him at eighth rank of Grand Knight — and even at that level, Divine Obstruction’s mechanics only guaranteed a stop against opponents whose spiritual power was within a certain threshold. Against a true fifth-rank demon hitting without any skill, just pure physical force, the numbers still worked.
What he hadn’t accounted for was the speed of the follow-up.
With the Dyke Clan assassin, there had been a fraction of a second of hesitation after Divine Obstruction landed. The assassin’s body had registered the block and paused.
The Dark Green Dual-Bladed Demon did not pause.
The second foreleg was already coming before the first had finished bouncing off.
Leo’s mind caught up a half-second too late. Darius was moving — he’d seen the opening — but the distance was wrong, the timing was wrong, and Leo was left with one option: take what was coming and shape it.
Bright Vengeance loaded into the light sword from the residual energy of Divine Obstruction. He brought it up to meet the second strike.
— *Ping* —
The sound was different from anything that had come before it.
Leo left the ground.
He traveled ten meters before he landed, hitting the earth sideways, bouncing once, and rolling to a stop. The light sword left his hand somewhere during the flight. His right hand was burning — the webbing between thumb and forefinger had torn, and his internal organs felt like they’d been rearranged by someone in a hurry.
He spat blood.
First real injury of the fight.
He was already pushing himself up before the ringing in his ears cleared.
---
Darius didn’t wait.
The instant Leo went airborne, the tower shield came forward — not a block, a body check. He drove into the demon’s midsection with everything he had and his full weight behind the shield, angled to redirect rather than absorb.
The Dark Green Dual-Bladed Demon moved seven or eight steps back. Darius moved the same distance in the opposite direction, barely keeping his footing.
Even the exchange was the gap the others needed.
Caden was already in the air.
Both fire blades came down in a Blazing Chop — the Whirlwind Strike’s momentum carried into the vertical drop, the two enchanted swords leaving streaks of scorched air as they hit the demon’s carapace across the upper back. Twin black marks appeared where the blades landed. The demon’s knees buckled fractionally.
Then Rose descended.
Mira had taken her up during the exchange, and the Rose Unicorn came down with its Multiple Images Attack — its body surrounded by a burning rose-colored aura, the spiritual energy concentrated into pure kinetic force. The impact drove the demon sideways across the frost-cracked ground, its forelegs gouging furrows in the earth as it fought to maintain balance.
It found its footing.
And turned directly back toward Leo.
The Lodestar Stove’s pull hadn’t weakened. Whatever damage the group piled on, whatever direction the hits came from — the demon’s attention always returned to the same point. It couldn’t help it. The Stove had locked onto something in its instincts and wouldn’t let go.
Leo was still recovering ten meters away.
A warm light bloomed against his back.
Not hostile. Gentle. Almost like sunlight finding you through a gap in the clouds.
Curing Light — from Little Light’s head, directed precisely at him while Little Flame continued sending fireballs toward the demon’s trajectory, not powerful enough to stop it but enough to slow its path by fractions of a second. The healing warmth spread through Leo’s hand, through his chest, knitting the torn webbing, easing the pressure in his ribs.
He got to his feet.
Picked up the light sword on the way.
---
The demon gathered itself to charge again — all six limbs briefly still, the olive-green glow intensifying across its forelegs. Three eyes locked on Leo.
Then both of Veyra’s heads opened at once.
The roar that came out wasn’t a sound so much as a weight. It hit the clearing like a wall — not loud the way thunder was loud, but deep, resonant, carrying something in it that went past the ears and landed somewhere older.
The Dark Green Dual-Bladed Demon flinched.
Its charge broke. Just for a second, just a stumble in its focus, its cold reptilian face registering something that might have been surprise.
Leo didn’t waste it.
He was already moving — not back into position, not waiting, *moving toward the others.* A leader didn’t stand alone in the middle of a fifth-rank demon’s attention indefinitely. He rejoined Darius in two strides, the two of them shoulder to shoulder again, and Leo cast one look at the Stone brothers.
Darius’s jaw was set. Caden’s breathing was ragged but controlled.
"Same as before," Leo said quietly. "Darius fills the gap. Caden, you hit when I hit."
Faith Halo spread from Leo’s position — the golden ring rippling outward, passing through each of them in turn, steadying the fear-spike that had been building with every exchange. He felt the group respond. The tension didn’t disappear, but it became something usable.
Behind them, Liora hadn’t moved from her casting position.
She’d been building something since the fight’s second exchange. The incantation was long — longer than anything she’d used before — the blue symbols around her staff multiplying with each breath, the water element in the air around her condensing into something that had almost no color, almost no temperature. Pure. Refined to its limit.
Mira on Rose’s back had gone very still. Her expression was the expression of someone who had stopped thinking and was simply waiting for the right moment. The golden-red aura pouring off Rose was building too — she was channeling everything the unicorn generated directly into her blades, letting it accumulate rather than spending it.
They both knew what the demon’s weakness was.
They just needed one more opening.
The demon recovered from Veyra’s roar and came again — faster this time, angry, the hesitation gone. Both forelegs raised.
Leo stepped forward.
Not backward. Not sideways.
*Forward.*
The demon’s first foreleg came down. Leo’s body angled to the left, the Daybright Aegis tilting to redirect rather than absorb, and the strike glanced off the shield’s edge at an angle — still powerful enough to stagger him, but not the direct impact it would have been. His feet scraped back two steps.
The second foreleg followed immediately.
This time Leo was ready for the speed.
The Daybright Aegis turned to face it — and on the shield’s surface, a white pattern bloomed. Thick. Geometric. Different from Divine Obstruction’s golden light.
The foreleg hit the pattern.
And slowed.
Not stopped — nothing stopped this demon’s raw force — but slowed. Enough that the impact, when it came, was something Leo could lean into rather than be thrown by. His heels dug in. His knees bent. The force spread through his body and into the ground.
He held.
"*Now!*"
Liora’s staff came down.
What she released wasn’t Ice Spear. It wasn’t anything she’d used before in this fight. The spell she’d been building for the last three exchanges came out as a single column of deep blue — not multiple lances, one solid strike that hit the demon across its already-cracked chest plates like a battering ram made of frozen ocean.
The carapace that had shattered her earlier ice lances broke.
A sound like grinding rock. Dark green fluid. Two of the chest plates separating at the fracture line.
The demon staggered.
Mira moved.
Rose’s wings spread as the unicorn launched — not a drop from above this time, a straight horizontal charge at full speed, the rose-gold aura burning white at the edges from everything that had been stored in it. Mira’s blades came out to both sides.
*Shining Sunlight Strike.*
The technique hit the exposed chest wound dead center.
The Dark Green Dual-Bladed Demon left the ground, traveled backward, and hit the earth so hard the frost around it cracked in a three-meter radius.
It didn’t get up immediately.
For a full three seconds, it lay still.
Then one foreleg pressed into the ground.
Then the second.
It pushed itself upright.
Its three eyes were dimmer. Its movements were slower. Green blood ran freely from the broken chest plates, staining the frost around it dark.
But it was standing.
And it was still looking at Leo.
Veyra moved to Leo’s side — both heads raised, both sets of eyes watching the demon, the purple-gold mark on her back pulsing steadily.
Leo raised the Daybright Aegis.
His hand had stopped bleeding. His ribs had stopped aching. The Curing Light had done its work.
He could go another round.
The question was whether the demon could.
The answer was in its eyes — three of them, all fixed on him, still burning with something that wasn’t giving up.
*Good,* Leo thought. *Neither am I.*