Gareth’s spear came forward.
Light Thrust — the golden edge of the technique burning along the blade as it shot toward Soren. Simultaneously, the Scarlet-Shelled Earthworm lurched into motion beneath him, its massive body driving into the ground with Breaking Charge, the earth shuddering outward in concentric rings.
Two attacks from different vectors. Mounted power plus spear technique. It should have been overwhelming.
Soren didn’t step back.
The Sacred Light column absorbed the Light Thrust without flickering. Then Soren’s staff came around — not a defensive sweep, an offensive one — and met the charging earthworm’s front segment with a palm strike that rang like a hammer hitting plate steel.
The earthworm staggered.
A two-meter magical beast in the middle of a charge, staggered by an open hand.
On the ridge above, Caden Stone stopped breathing for a moment.
Soren didn’t stop. He pivoted, used the momentum of the parry to bring the staff around in a full arc, and drove it into the earthworm’s flank. The impact sound carried all the way up the slope.
Gareth’s upper body snapped sideways. He wrenched the reins to keep the earthworm from going down completely, his spear forced wide by the shockwave. Two meters back, then three, then the earthworm found its footing and stopped.
Below them, Mira said nothing.
The two warriors in Gareth’s group had recovered and were moving again. Both armed with greatswords, they split left and right, coming in from opposite angles. At the same moment, the two mages released — twin fireballs, timed to bracket Soren’s retreat path.
Soren took two steps back.
The move looked like a concession. The warriors closed the gap instantly, greatswords raised.
The staff’s top glowed white.
*Sacred Hammer.*
He didn’t swing it forward. He swung it behind him, without looking, at exactly the angle the assassin in dark cloth had been approaching from.
The assassin had been two steps away from a perfect flank strike. He caught the hammer instead. The impact launched him sideways through the air, and he hit the ground hard enough to bounce once before going still.
One of the fireballs found Soren through the edge of the Sacred Light column.
He took it. Didn’t dodge. The impact drove him back six steps, and the white robes caught fire along one shoulder and burned.
"Arg—"
The sound that came out of him was not a scream. It was something lower and more dangerous. He straightened to his full height, and the burned robe fell apart at the shoulder seam, exposing the arm and upper torso beneath.
"Gods," Darius said quietly.
Soren’s musculature was not the musculature of a priest. It was barely the musculature of a human. His arms were thick as timber, his chest and back a landscape of dense, defined mass that caught the afternoon light like hammered bronze. The burns from the fireball were visible across his ribs — red, scorched lines that he appeared to be experiencing as an inconvenience rather than an injury.
"MADNESS!"
Caden was already on his feet. "*A priest using Madness?*"
Madness was a Warrior Temple secret technique — awarded only for significant contributions, impossible to learn through normal cultivation, not even available to every berserker. The skill required a body conditioned far beyond standard limits. Caden himself, despite being a berserker by specialization, had never qualified for it.
The bald priest at the center of a five-person assault was using it.
In Madness mode, Soren moved differently. The casual brutality was gone, replaced by something focused and mechanical, each motion optimized for maximum force transfer. His staff swept upward and downward in rapid succession, the two warriors forced back two steps each before they could find an angle to press. The Scarlet-Shelled Earthworm took another impact and this time its legs genuinely failed it — it stumbled, recovered, stumbled again.
"Keep pushing!" Gareth’s voice was strained. "Madness can’t hold forever. Wear him down."
The two mages behind Gareth raised their staffs together.
A three-meter column of red light assembled in the air above them — fire attributes combining, spiraling inward, pulling heat from the surrounding air as it built. Glorious Scattering Fire Dance. A fifth-tier combined technique, only usable when two mages shared sufficient attunement to synchronize their casting.
The spell locked onto Soren.
Even in Madness mode, even with his body reinforced, a direct hit from Glorious Scattering Fire Dance would end this fight.
Soren saw it. His expression changed.
And then two points of light dropped from above.
They didn’t announce themselves. No shouted warning, no dramatic entrance. One red, one white — falling through the air between the ridgeline and the clearing floor in the space of a heartbeat.
The red light hit Soren first.
Red-gold inscriptions spread across his skin in an instant — a network of luminous marks that covered his arms, shoulders, chest. His strength surged. His next swing with the staff drove both warriors back five meters instead of two, their boots cutting furrows in the earth as they slid.
The white light moved toward the mages.
Glorious Scattering Fire Dance lost its lock.
The spell, which had been tracking Soren with unwavering precision, shifted sideways and detonated against open ground instead — a ten-meter circle of scorched earth, fire blooming upward and collapsing, ash rising in a column.
When the ash settled, someone was standing in the center of it.
A young man. The golden light of what had been a buff technique — the red inscriptions — still faded from his skin as he stood completely unhurt inside the burn radius, hands at his sides, looking at Gareth’s mages with an expression that suggested he found their combined technique mildly interesting.
Leo looked up from the ridge.
The young man below was someone he’d never seen before.
But from the way he’d redirected a fifth-tier combined spell without apparent effort, and from the quality of the two techniques he’d deployed — one amplifying Soren, one disrupting the mages’ targeting — whoever this was had arrived for a reason.
"Little brother," Mira said beside him, already moving toward the slope. "I think it’s time."
"Agreed," Leo said.
They descended.