"Ronan," Jas said. "Can you hold it alone?"
"Define alone."
"You, Maeve, and Cillian. In the square. While Finn and I go for the cross."
The Dark Knight was already moving again, sword low, circling back toward the formation with the repaired shoulder leading.
"Then say that," Ronan said. "That’s not alone."
"Can you hold it?"
"Yes."
"Then hold it."
Finn stepped up beside Jas. He looked at the boss, then at Ronan, and his jaw set. "I don’t like leaving him in front of that thing."
"Hitting it again does nothing," Jas said. "The cross repairs everything we break. We kill the cross first or we die tired."
Finn exhaled once through his nose. "Fine."
"Maeve. We’re going out of your range."
"I know." Her hands were still up, the circlet burning over her brow. "I’ll stretch the field as far as it goes. Past that, you’re on partial cover. If the corruption starts climbing, you co back. You don’t push through it. Understood?"
"Understood."
She pushed, and Jas felt the field reach after them like a rope paying out.
[PURIFY FIELD EXTENSION ATTEMPTED] [APOSTLE’S RADIANT CIRCLET RESPONDING] [WARNING: EFFECTIVENESS REDUCED OUTSIDE PRIMARY RANGE] [CORRUPTION RESISTANCE PARTIALLY MAINTAINED]
[TRBWatcher]: They’re splitting pressure.
[RaidStatsGuy]: Ronan holds boss. Jas and Finn hit the cross. That’s the play.
[GuildScout_EU]: This is the clear chanic. Two parties died without finding it.
[Anonymous donated €15,000]: BREAK THE THING.
Jas and Finn ran for the steps.
The shrine did not wait for them.
Ten ters out, the red marks in the mud rose. Not into bodies. Into lines — thin red threads lifting out of the ground like veins pulled free of the earth, whipping toward ankles and wrists and throats.
Finn cut the first two out of the air with one swing.
They fell, sank into the mud, and started rising again from the sa marks.
"They co back," Finn said.
"Kill the marks, not the lines."
A thread snapped at Jas’s leg and he cut it with his sword — the first ti the blade had co out all fight — then put a Necro Blast into the glowing mark it had grown from.
[NECRO BLAST ACTIVATED] [MANA: 1,390/1,420 → 1,360/1,420] [SHRINE MARK DAMAGED]
The mark dimd. Finn brought the flat of his axe down on it like a hamr.
CRUNCH.
It went dark. The thread above it dropped dead into the mud and stayed there.
"That works," Finn said.
"Then we do it twelve more tis."
Behind them, the square answered with a sound like a car crash.
BOOM.
Jas didn’t turn. He didn’t need to. The System told him.
[DARK KNIGHT OF THE SUCCUBUS CROSS — GRAVE STRIKE] [RONAN CLEARY — HP: 2,240/2,600 → 1,510/2,600] [RADIANT THREAD ACTIVE] [CORRUPTION SPREAD SLOWED]
"Still here," Ronan called across the square. It ca out flatter than before. Costlier.
Maeve’s voice, tight: "Move faster, you two."
In the square, Ronan was paying for every second.
The Dark Knight had stopped treating him like a wall and started treating him like a door it intended to co through. It hit the shield high, then low, then high again, and every impact drove his boots another centiter back through the mud. His shield arm had gone from aching to shaking. The plate along the shield’s face was dented in two places that had been flat a minute ago.
It shifted its weight to go around him — toward the steps, toward Jas and Finn’s exposed backs.
Cillian hit its knee.
CRACK.
[CILLIAN WARD — LIGHTNING INTERRUPT] [DARK KNIGHT MOVENT DELAYED] [ARMOR RESISTANCE: HIGH]
The bolt didn’t hurt it. It didn’t need to. The leg stalled for half a second and Ronan slid back into its path, shield up.
"Stop trying to leave," Ronan said through his teeth. "It’s rude."
The boss hit him again for that.
Maeve put a pulse into him before he finished absorbing it.
[RADIANT PULSE ACTIVATED] [RONAN CLEARY — HP: 1,510/2,600 → 1,960/2,600] [MAEVE CALLAHAN — MANA: 410/1,460 → 240/1,460]
Cillian saw the number on her mana and his eyes flicked to her face.
"How much left?"
"Enough," Maeve said. "Don’t ask again."
[RaidStatsGuy]: Maeve is burning mana FAST. 240 left.
[TRBWatcher]: Ronan drops and the run ends. Simple as that.
[IronRingLive]: That shield is the only wall left in the square.
At the steps, the lines got worse.
Every mark Jas and Finn killed, two more brightened closer to the shrine. By the bottom of the stairs the mud was a net of red, threads rising faster than two n could cut, and Jas did the maths and didn’t like it.
So he changed it.
"Go to the base," he told the python.
The snake moved. Wounded, scales split along one flank, it still crossed the square like a current through water and hit the shrine’s foundation from the side. It coiled around the stone base of the steps — once, twice — and clamped.
The cross reacted instantly. Red lines stabbed down off the shrine into the snake’s body, dozens of them, biting between the scales and pulling like hooks trying to drag it flat against the stone.
The python tightened instead.
Stone cracked. The shrine’s base ground sideways a hand’s width, and half the red marks on the stairs guttered as the lines feeding them pulled out of true.
[ABYSSAL VENOM PYTHON — BINDING COIL] [SHRINE STRUCTURE RESTRICTED] [CONTRACTED UNDEAD DAMAGED] [ABYSSAL VENOM PYTHON — HP: 5,120/9,500 → 4,280/9,500]
Jas felt every hook through the contract, a row of cold needles down his spine. The snake held anyway.
The stairs were open.
[GuildScout_EU]: He’s using the snake ON THE SHRINE.
[RaidStatsGuy]: Don’t fight the boss. Attack the anchor. Textbook.
[Anonymous donated €20,000]: HOLD IT THERE.
"Now," Jas said, and went up the steps with Finn on his shoulder.
Up close, the cross was worse than it looked from the square.
It wasn’t mounted on the shrine. It was grown through it — black-red material run through the stone like root through soil, and under its surface things moved. Veins. Slow pulses travelling its length, and every pulse that left the cross arrived a half-second later under the Dark Knight’s armor in the square below.
"Maeve!" Jas called. "Brand it!"
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