Lilith whistles, and all of the demon maids start to get up while preparing for the next finishing attack that could seal Kaelira’s fate.
Kaelira faced them with everything she had in a long burst that lit up the room like a sun going off in a closed space. "I WON’T LOSEEEE...!!!"
At the sa ti, she heard the sounds of the constructs taking damage, saw that Lilith was moving to the side instead of straight ahead, which ant she was clearing her line, and felt the specific quality of focus that cos from having made a decision and being past the point of going back to it.
The maids pushed through. One of the maids took the full hit and disintegrated, which was satisfying from a tactical point of view, but it did not significantly reduce the number of enemies.
A shadow construct got into her fire radius and hit her on the side. She felt the cold go through her body in a way that made her body imdiately know sothing was wrong, even though she was still full of adrenaline.
Another one hit her shoulder. She kept the fire going.
The third maid got her from behind, and she felt the impact in her spine, and the fire guttered out.
She held it through the next impact and the one after that, and she was on both knees on the floor, and her fire was the only light in the chamber because the bioluminescence had been fully suppressed, and Lilith was standing in front of her at a distance of maybe four feet with that sa expression that said she had known, had always known.
Kaelira looked up at her from the floor, both hands still held in front of her with what was left of the fire, and her breath was coming in the slow, controlled rhythm of soone who was using their last serious reserves to maintain one function and had made their peace with what that ant for everything else.
"Hah... hah... hah..."
’There’s no use...’
’I’m starting to lose focus... and I can’t... think straight any longer...’
She thought about Apollo. The way he had looked at her two hours ago and two hundred ters above her head when she finally said it out loud after holding it in for longer than she wanted to admit.
He answered in a simple way because that’s just how he was; he didn’t make things difficult. She let herself think about that for exactly as long as she could.
Then she put everything she had, which wasn’t much, into the shape of the biggest sustained burst her class could make.
However, her goal was not to defeat them all.
She was done with the math on that.
All she needed to do right now was...
To be heard.
Just like when she confessed for the first ti to Apollo.
The burst went upward at full output, focused into the passage opening above her, and the sound it produced when it hit the stone at the top was not an explosion in the technical sense. It was an eruption, contained and channeled, a column of fire that hit the dungeon’s upper level from below like a signal fire going off inside the structure.
Lilith moved back two steps. The maids stopped.
In the last second before the light from the burst faded and left only shadow, Kaelira’s expression was not afraid.
The chamber went dark.
BAAAAAAAAMMMMMMMMMM!!!!
The main chamber heard it.
There was no missing it. The floor beneath them shook once, hard, and a column of light ca up through the southwest passage opening so brightly that it turned the dungeon’s pale bioluminescence into shadow for a full second.
Apollo was in the middle of a strike when it happened. The shockwave from the burst traveling through the stone floors hit his feet right when he was putting his weight forward, and the two forces sent him sideways.
"K-Kaelira...!?"
He hit the ground rolling and ca up, and three things happened at once: the apex creature staggered from the disruption, every person in the chamber lost their footing for a second or two, and smoke began to move through the southwest passage in heavy white clouds.
Rex had been standing near Aisella when the burst went off. He tracked the trajectory of the light through the passage opening with the particular quality of attention that already knew what it was and had to perform the expression that belonged to not knowing.
He looked worried and stayed that way.
In two seconds, Apollo was up and moving toward the southwest passage. No one said anything or gave an order, and the smoke hadn’t cleared enough to see through yet.
"Kaelira..." he said.
It wasn’t a scream. It was really quiet, and that made it worse in so way.
He ran through the passage, and Elizabeth said, "Hold," behind him, but no one did, because when Apollo moved toward sothing, people followed him like they followed fire, not because they wanted to, but because it took too long to decide to stop.
Rex followed along with the others, staying three steps behind Aisella. His face displayed the appropriate expression for situations like this.
The secondary chamber was full of smoke and the leftover heat from an Inferno Berserker running at full power. The walls had been burned in patterns that spread out from the middle of the room.
The undead constructs were gone, just as planned, during the mont of the burst when Kaelira’s fire had covered their escape.
There was no sign of the person who had done this to her. There were no bodies, no proof, and nothing that made sense of what had happened.
And then when everything was clear... everyone could see it.
Kaelira was on the floor in the center of the chamber.
Apollo got to her first and knelt down in one motion. The sound he made wasn’t a word or a cry; it was the sound of soone whose body had reacted to sothing before their mind had fully processed what they were seeing.
She was barely breathing, and she had serious injuries, including many deep cuts on her arms and torso, burns that weren’t from her own fire at the edges of several wounds, and cold damage that made the heat she was producing worse.
But she was still alive.
Rex saw Aisella push through the group that had gathered at the entrance to the passage and cross the chamber floor faster than he had ever seen her do before.
She fell to her knees on the other side of Kaelira from Apollo, her hands already running the diagnostic pass that he rembered from the journey and the fight upstairs.
"She’s alive," Aisella said, her voice steady like that of a healer in an ergency, maintaining composure because the situation could not afford anything less.
"Hold still, Apollo. Don’t move her."
Apollo had both hands on Kaelira’s shoulders, and his face was doing sothing that Rex cataloged carefully: not panic, not rage, sothing that was quieter and more total than either of those things.
Aisella moved quickly. The Divine Priestess’s healing didn’t happen quickly, as she had said on the way to the dungeon.
Instead, she carefully calibrated her work, asking the body what it needed instead of flooding it with energy and hoping for the best.
Rex watched it while Apollo and the nine minus two won who had co into the space were behind him. Each of them reacted to what they saw in a different way, and he was recording their reactions for later use.
The cuts healed. The cold damage at the edges of the wound needed more careful work, and Aisella’s face got tight when she hit it, like a healer’s face when they see sothing that needs to be fixed exactly.
It took eleven minutes. Rex counted them.
After eleven minutes, Aisella reclined on her heels and gazed at Apollo.
"She needs to rest and be watched," she said. "The cold damage is treated, but her reserves are at a level I’ve never seen a living person survive..."
"Her body prioritized keeping her fire output active over keeping herself intact." There was a pause. "Whatever happened in here, she stayed strong for a long ti."
Rex felt disappointed right away, seeing Kaelira was saved. And it seems like those maids didn’t get the job done.
’What a fucking disgrace...’
’They couldn’t do one simple fucking job...’
Apollo’s jaw was set like people’s jaws are when they don’t want to cry right now because doing so would an stopping what they were doing, which was mostly holding themselves together.
"Can she be moved?" he asked.
"Yes, carefully."
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