The climb was three hundred ters of vertical hell.
Chinedu’s fighters scrambled up the rock face in clusters of two and three, bleeding hands grabbing at stone that crumbled under their weight, boots slipping on slick mineral deposits while Slashers snapped at their legs from below. The ones who’d made it highest were sixty ters up and already exhausted, arms shaking, armor dragging them down, every handhold a negotiation between gravity and the desperate need to not be in the basin anymore.
The basin had beco a pit.
The Colossus had stopped chasing Chinedu’s squad. The massive creature had turned its attention to easier prey, and easier prey was everywhere. A fighter who’d fallen from Nyx’s second boulder lay crumpled against a slab of dark stone, trying to drag himself toward the wall with one working arm. The Colossus found him and he was trampled to death.
Stacy was thirty ters up when her arm gave out.
Luna’s chain arc had seized the muscles in her sword hand and forearm into a rigid claw, and the damage hadn’t faded. She’d been climbing one-handed, Trisha pulling her from above, teeth gritted against the dead weight of her own limb. Every ter was agony. Every reach with her good hand ant trusting her boots on stone that shifted and broke.
She slipped.
Her good hand caught a ledge and held, but the jolt sent white fire through her damaged arm, and the scream that tore out of her was raw and involuntary. She dangled only five ters above the basin floor, one hand on crumbling rock, legs kicking for purchase that wasn’t there.
"Ash!" Her voice cracked across the basin. "Ash, help !"
Ash heard her.
He was forty ters to her left and higher up, ribs grinding with every movent, blood still wet on his chin, hauling himself upward through pure S-tier stubbornness. His head snapped toward the sound of her voice and his eyes found her imdiately, small and dangling against the vast dark wall, feet scrambling against nothing.
Below her, the Colossus turned.
Six eyes locked onto the screaming, kicking figure on the rock face with the slow, predatory focus of a creature that had spent all of its years as the thing everything else ran from. Its massive body shifted, mineral plates grinding against each other like tectonic shelves, and it moved toward the wall where Stacy hung.
"Stacy, climb!" Ash roared.
She couldn’t. Her sword arm was dead weight and her good hand was losing its grip, fingers white against the stone, the ledge crumbling centiter by centiter under her. Trisha reached down from above, stretching, their fingertips six inches apart.
Five.
Four.
The Colossus raised one leg.
The limb was the size of a freight car, mineral-plated, dense enough that its shadow carried weight on its own. It hung above the base of the wall for a mont that lasted exactly long enough for Ash to understand what was about to happen and know, with the absolute certainty of distance and physics, that he could not get there in ti.
"No!"
The leg ca down.
It hit the wall where Stacy hung like a freight train hitting a mannequin. The rock face caved inward and Stacy’s body went with it, crushed between the mineral plate and the stone in a compression that no enchantnt, no armor could survive. Her ribcage folded. The sound was wet and structural at the sa ti, bone and tal and stone compacting into a space that couldn’t hold all three.
The Colossus ground its leg sideways.
Stacy was still alive for that part. The scream that ca out of her was thin and high and wrong, the sound of lungs that had been flattened to half their depth trying to push air through a throat that was barely connected to them anymore. Her good hand clawed at the mineral plate pressing into her chest, fingers scraping grooves into the stone, and her legs kicked twice against nothing before the creature shifted its weight forward and the wall behind her gave way entirely.
Trisha and Brittany scread.
When the Colossus pulled its leg back, what slid down the rock face and hit the basin floor didn’t fall the way a body falls. It fell the way a bag of wet gravel falls, heavy and shapeless, leaving a sar of red and pulverized armor down fifteen ters of dark stone.
Ash stopped climbing.
His fingers were still locked on the rock, his body pressed to the wall, but the fight behind his eyes had gone out. For three full seconds he hung there motionless, staring at the place where a woman who’d fought beside him since their first training drill was now a stain on dark stone.
Brittany’s voice reached him from sowhere below, broken and sobbing and calling Stacy’s na, but Ash wasn’t listening to Brittany. He wasn’t listening to Chinedu shouting orders or the Slashers shrieking or the distant hum of another volley charging on the ridge above.
He looked up.
Hundreds of ters above him, Kaiden Grey stood on the ridge with his arms folded, watching the basin with absolute detachnt.
The rage that hit Ash was structural. It was load-bearing. It reached into the place where his ribs were broken and his lungs were filling with blood and his body was telling him to stop, and it told all of those things to shut up.
"KAIDEN GREY!"
His voice tore across the basin and up the cliff face, raw enough to almost shatter stone.
The S-tier core in his chest ignited.
Ash’s body erupted with energy. His blade blazed white-gold as every reserve he didn’t even know he had left was poured into it. The rock beneath his boots cratered and he launched off the wall, rocketing upward in a straight vertical line with his sword drawn back and murder in every fiber of his body. The distance between him and Kaiden Grey closed fast, the first hundred ters gone in under two seconds.
"I’LL KILL YOU!"
A promise made by a man who’d stopped caring about consequences, about the competition, about everything except putting his blade through the chest of the person responsible for what was left of Stacy on the basin floor.
Two hundred ters.
One fifty.
Kaiden didn’t move.
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