Of the five remaining, only the two largest managed to clear the palisade completely.

  I ran in front of Morgana before she needed to fall back — shield raised, positioned between her and the creatures. But before I even reached the right angle, an arrow whistled past my shoulder and pierced the first one through the throat.

  She had already taken one down.

  The second remained.

  And the second was enormous.

  "You're a lot bigger up close, you son of a bitch…"

  It resembled a Siberian tiger in general shape — but with canines disproportionate to the skull, a chest width that matched no feline proportions I knew, and a muscular density the body's weight transmitted to the ground with every step. The height of a small horse. But with mass far beyond what that frame suggested.

  The Blood Magic ritual had already been prepared before the battle. I activated it.

  The world turned hot. The rage converted to fuel before I finished processing the conversion.

  I struck my sword against the shield.

  CLANG.

  The sound echoed across the clearing. The creature advanced — not in a straight line, but diagonally, testing the flank. Intelligent for something without an Alpha coordinating it.

  The swipe came like a moving trunk.

  I flew.

  "YOU SON OF A BITCH—!"

  I rolled on the ground, absorbed the impact through the shoulder, got up on pure instinct before the analysis arrived. It was already in the air — entire body projected, aiming for my throat with the precision of something that had performed that movement hundreds of times.

  I raised the shield and drove the sword into its chest simultaneously.

  The creature screamed. So did I.

  The blood gushed — and with it, the acid. The blade conducted the corrosive liquid directly up the sword to my forearm and ribs. It wasn't pain in the sense I had experienced before. It was the kind the brain classifies as a structural emergency — flesh being consumed in real time, without pause, without gradation.

  I yanked the sword out. Drove it in again. Again.

  The creature collapsed on top of me, still trying to close its jaw around my head. The shield held — but my hands were trembling at the frequency of muscles operating beyond capacity, and my vision was beginning to darken at the edges.

  Then the weight disappeared.

  The creature toppled sideways. An arrow passed completely through its skull.

  "Thank you, Morgana…"

  "Lord, let me heal you."

  "Not yet."

  I forced myself up. The territory wasn't clear yet — and lowering my guard with active enemies was the mistake I would not make.

  I ran with her to the palisade.

  The scene was worse than I had estimated. The three remaining ones weren't trying to climb or force a direct entry — they were using the structure itself as cover, positioned in the blind spots where the towers had no line of sight. The inner tower didn't reach. The outer one was out of range.

  I had prioritized coverage of the mine. Now I was paying the price of a defensive corridor with a blind spot.

  "Damn… they're using the palisade to hide."

  Then I understood their strategy.

  Two of them were attacking their own companion — not in frenzy, but with purpose. The acidic blood poured in quantity, melting the wood at the base with the efficiency of something designed for exactly that. A suicidal strategy. But it worked: while I had dealt with the largest one, the other two had found the breach by sacrificing one of their own.

  "They're going to get through."

  "Morgana, behind me!"

  "You're too badly wounded!"

  She was right. The acid was still burning through my ribs. My blood was running in quantities I preferred not to quantify. My vision was failing at intervals.

  But if I fell, she would die. Healers heal others — not themselves. Without armor, without close-range defense, she was precision and reach. Both useless against something that got within two meters.

  I was the only thing between her and the end.

  "I'll hold. Want to help? Kill these sons of bitches before I collapse."

  A clean shot. One of the intruders fell before creating enough space to get through.

  One remained. Smaller than the first — but still the size of an adult lion, and with the specific fury of something that knows it is the last of the pack.

  Under normal conditions, I would beat it without question.

  I was not under normal conditions.

  It advanced. I screamed — the sound torn from my chest before the decision, forcing the body to continue before it asked for permission to stop. Blood Magic pushed to its limit.

  I raised the shield and ran to meet it.

  The impact didn't launch me. That alone was a victory.

  But my blood kept pouring. The creature was trying to tear the shield away with its fangs, scraping the metal in movements that vibrated through the entire arm to the shoulder. Morgana was trying to shoot — but I was too close. The angle would kill me before hitting it.

  The creature knew it was the last. And that giving up meant dying.

  We both knew the same thing.

  "Just die already… DAMN!"

  The fight wasn't about who would win. It was about who would last longer. Thirty seconds that felt like double, each second paid in blood from both sides — until the right angle appeared for half a second.

  My blade passed through the creature's eye.

  It shuddered. And fell, dragging me with it.

  Silence.

  I lay on the ground — covered in blood, acid, and dirt — staring at the sky. My body wasn't asking if I wanted to get up. It simply didn't move.

  And then I started laughing.

  A nervous, uncontrolled laugh, without any humor — the kind the nervous system produces when it exhausts every other way of processing what just happened.

  "Hahahahaha…"

  I looked at the partially melted palisade. At the bodies scattered around. At the sky that remained exactly the same, indifferent to what had happened beneath it.

  "So this is it."

  It wasn't glory. It wasn't heroism. It was surviving — barely, very barely — and the difference between that and not surviving was one of Morgana's arrows at the right moment.

  ?

  Morgana ran to me the moment the last creature fell. She knelt at my side and her hands went straight to the wounds — without asking permission, without waiting for instruction. The energy flowed, the world became muffled, and the pain converted to a distant echo as the flesh began to reconstitute itself.

  "Finally… Damn… I genuinely thought I was going to die."

  But Morgana wasn't responding. Her gaze was fixed beyond the palisade — cold, calculating, with the specific concentration of someone who had identified something before being certain.

  "What's happening?"

  "He came back, Lord. He's watching… calculating."

  The Alpha.

  Of course.

  It had all been orchestrated. As I had suspected, the Snarlers hadn't arrived by chance — they were calculated pressure, designed to drain my resources, my energy, my blood, before he entered. He had waited for the moment when I was exactly as I was now: alive, but by a narrow margin.

  This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

  "If I were him… this would be the perfect window."

  My thought arrived a second too late.

  "He's coming."

  Morgana abandoned the healing, stood, and fired. Then another arrow. The projectiles cut through the dimness — I heard the impacts, but not the screams that should have followed.

  "Damn… he's fast."

  In less than ten seconds, a colossal shadow cleared the entire palisade.

  It didn't climb. It didn't force. It simply leapt. It landed inside the territory with an impact that made the ground tremble beneath my feet, and rose slowly, as though rapid movement was for creatures that needed speed to compensate for size.

  It didn't need to.

  Over five meters standing upright. The branching antlers seemed to reach for the tree canopy. Two of Morgana's arrows embedded in its chest and leg — and it ignored them with the indifference of something that had learned, over decades, that pain was information, not an obstacle.

  Its eyes found mine.

  Full of hatred. And of something I recognized as more dangerous: intent.

  It was here to finish this.

  "Morgana. Behind me."

  I stood up. Staggering — my body still incomplete from the interrupted healing, the blood loss still present in the trembling of my hands and the slowness of my reflexes. Blood Magic was still active, but operating on low reserves. I knew what that meant for the rebound when it ended.

  There was no alternative that didn't involve fighting.

  "I take it you don't want to talk this out."

  It stared at me. Motionless. With that ancient patience I had identified in the cave — the patience of something that waits because it can, not because it needs to.

  It knew I was wounded. It knew this was the best window it would have. And it wanted me to know that it knew — it wanted to see the recognition in my eyes before advancing.

  That irritated me more than the fear did.

  "Let's finish this."

  It abandoned its bipedal posture in the same instant — without transition, without visible preparation. It simply dropped to all fours and the speed shifted categories. It wasn't what I had estimated for that size. It was absurdly faster.

  I raised the sword. No shield — I had calculated that its speed made static defense useless. It was a damage trade. A single window.

  When it entered range, I cut for the throat.

  It dodged.

  Not completely — but enough. The antler entered my abdomen instead of my chest, and for a fraction of a second I felt nothing. Cold first. Then heat. Then the absence that comes when the nervous system decides that registering damage of that magnitude would be counterproductive.

  It lifted me.

  Shook its head like someone discarding something worthless.

  And threw me.

  "AAAAAAH—!"

  The air fled before the impact. I rolled without direction — the body meeting the ground however it met it. I felt the hole in my abdomen with each rotation. I felt the warm blood soaking the armor from the inside.

  My consciousness began to darken at the edges.

  And then the memories came — fragmented, out of order. Childhood. The specific smell of the kitchen in the house where I grew up. My sister's face on an afternoon I couldn't date, only recognize.

  "Good thing… she isn't here."

  It wasn't despair. It was the kind of thought that comes when the brain begins taking stock — quickly, without drama, with the objectivity of someone who realizes there may not be time left to elaborate. She would be alive. That was enough to be the right last thought to have.

  Ninety percent mortality rate.

  Now I understood that number in a way no amount of reading had ever conveyed.

  "To hell with it."

  It wasn't heroic resolve. It was refusal — the specific refusal of someone who recognizes the odds are bad and decides that isn't sufficient argument to stop.

  "I'm not dying without taking you with me."

  I forced Blood Magic beyond its operational limit. I knew it was a mistake — my body was already drained, and forcing the magic in that state meant drawing from reserves that didn't exist. But the energy exploded regardless, and the blood poured even harder, like an open tap, and I got up.

  "COME ON!"

  It advanced. Rage in its eyes — the rage of something that had calculated my fall and received the wrong answer.

  Morgana fired two arrows. Both struck the head — but the antlers protected most of the skull, and what reached flesh wasn't enough to alter its trajectory.

  This time I didn't cut.

  I extended my arm. Pointed the sword. And used the force of its own charge — the same principle that made a lance thrust more lethal than a strike: it wasn't my strength that would kill it, it was its own.

  It realized at the last instant. It raised its arm to cut through my torso before the blade arrived.

  An arrow passed through its cheek from one side to the other.

  The arm deflected half a second off time.

  I threw myself against it — without retreating, without calculating safe distance — and drove the sword deep into its chest. Impaling it with the same movement it had used on me.

  It roared. A sound that made the ground vibrate.

  The kick that followed tore the sword from my arms and launched me a second time. I rolled. Landed far. My vision cut out for one complete second — not gradual darkening, but a cut, like a switch.

  It came back.

  It was still standing.

  With my sword driven through its chest. With arrows in its torso, shoulders, and mouth. With dark blood running in quantities that should have been fatal three times over. And still standing.

  The tower fired without cease — massive bolts that found flesh but not vital points, because the tower didn't know how to aim, only how to fire.

  Morgana knew.

  Each of her arrows drew a grunt of irritation from the creature. Few — five-second reload, and she managed each one with the precision of someone who knows that waste is death. Every one found the right place.

  Desperation appeared in its eyes.

  Not immediately. Gradually — the way the certainty of death arrives in something that had never considered the possibility of losing. It knew. Death was approaching.

  I raised my arms. Closed my fists. No sword, no shield, nothing but what remained of the magic and what remained of the body.

  "Come on, you son of a bitch."

  I needed it focused on me — so Morgana could get the right angle. That wasn't difficult. The rage of having been impaled by the Lord of the very territory it had destroyed its pawns to take — and who still refused to die — was fuel enough for anything.

  It advanced at a march. Slow. Heavy. Each step making the ground tremble, each movement costing blood it no longer had to spend. Two tower bolts whistled past its side without finding anything vital.

  I retreated one step for every one of its advances.

  It wasn't cowardice. It was the only calculation available to someone disarmed, without enough blood to sustain the magic for more than seconds, buying time for Morgana's angle to open.

  "Why won't you just go down?"

  Two more arrows. It understood the strategy.

  And charged.

  "Damn… I thought you'd stay stupid for longer."

  I tried to keep my arms raised. They gave out — circuit disconnected, without warning. My vision was cutting in blocks now, not gradual. The world was spinning.

  My body simply surrendered to the weight.

  It wasn't surrender — it was total exhaustion, the kind that doesn't ask permission and doesn't accept argument. I had reached the end of what was physically possible, and that was all.

  "I'm sorry…"

  The voice came out almost inaudible. It wasn't for him.

  "Sister… I failed."

  I closed my eyes. Waited for the impact. Waited for the antlers.

  What came was —

  THUD.

  A heavy sound. Something large hitting the ground.

  Silence.

  I opened my eyes.

  The Wendigo Alpha lay before me. Motionless. An arrow passed completely through its temple — from one side to the other, with the precision of someone who had waited for the exact angle for however long it took.

  The monster that had survived decades in that territory was dead.

  I tried to smile.

  My vision darkened. And the world disappeared.

  ?

  "Damn… am I dead?"

  I sat up sharply, drawing air as though surfacing from depth. The reflex passed before orientation did — a few seconds until the room became recognizable, the bed, the low ceiling of the Lord's cabin.

  The last thing I remembered was the Alpha falling. Then darkness without duration.

  "What is this…?"

  I looked at my abdomen. A long, closed scar — thick, pale, with the appearance of a wound with years of healing behind it, not hours.

  Beyond that, I was completely naked.

  "You almost died. I managed to heal you in time."

  Morgana was beside the bed.

  I hadn't noticed until that moment. Serene.

  "You… why?"

  The question had another target. Healing was what she did — the choice that had preceded the healing was what I needed to understand.

  Invoked heroes obeyed. It was the fundamental structure of the bond — without question, without refusal, without personal agenda that conflicted with the Lord's. If I ordered her to fight to the death, she would fight. That was how it worked.

  But there was a gap the Compendium mentioned in half a page, as a footnote: if the Lord died, the bond broke. The hero became free — free to leave, to build something of their own, to exist in the Oasis without a leash.

  I had almost died. She had seen it. She had had seconds — perhaps more — in which waiting was the only thing necessary for freedom to arrive on its own.

  But she hadn't waited.

  "I don't betray people."

  Simple. Direct. Without elaboration, without visible emotional weight — but carrying everything those four words contained for someone who had died for exactly that reason.

  She had been betrayed. And she had decided, with the clarity of someone who had turned experience into principle, that she would not do the same to get what she wanted.

  I breathed deeply.

  "I understand. Thank you."

  She nodded. No "you're welcome." No elaboration. The matter was closed for her, and I respected her enough not to reopen it.

  "How long was I unconscious?" "Four hours. Day has already broken. No enemies appeared."

  A pause.

  "However…"

  "I know."

  The territory was empty of threat — no Alpha, no pack, nothing claiming that area. I had eliminated everything that had tried to take Sparta. Which meant the surrounding territory was in a power vacuum, and vacuums in the Oasis didn't last.

  Opportunity. And risk. Simultaneously.

  "Where are the bodies?"

  "I already collected the stones, Lord."

  She opened her hand. Six small stones — and one larger, almost double the size of the others, with an internal glow more stable and more dense.

  "That one is his." "Yes."

  I took all of them. Stored them in the ring. Then separated two of the smaller ones and extended them to her.

  "Use them."

  She looked at me — with the gaze of someone recalibrating an expectation in real time, reorganizing what they had assumed as given.

  "You were essential. This isn't courtesy."

  "Thank you." "Don't thank me. I'd be dead."

  It was truth without qualification. Without Morgana, I would be one more number in the ninety percent statistic. The Alpha had calculated exactly that — and had been wrong because of one variable it hadn't included in the calculation.

  ?

  I stepped out of the cabin.

  The morning air was fresh, with that specific quality of hours just after sunrise when the humidity hadn't yet fully evaporated. My territory still standing — damaged palisade, marks of acid and blood on the ground, bodies Morgana had already moved outside the central perimeter.

  And something I didn't remember ordering built.

  "Is that…?"

  "A stable. Built and functional." — Morgana had stepped out right behind me. — "The egg has already been placed inside. I included the materials necessary for incubation… although they were costly."

  She avoided my gaze directly when she said the last part.

  Zeus had finalized the construction automatically — that was expected. But the egg had been in the cabin when I had passed out. Or rather, it had been. She had taken it. Had checked the incubation requirements, set aside the materials, and started the process while I was unconscious.

  Without an order. On her own initiative.

  I stared at the stable for a few seconds. Then at her.

  There was more than competence there. There was care — the kind that doesn't announce itself.

  That was when I realized I was naked.

  "Damn… where are my clothes?"

  "Here."

  She extended the obsidian armor. And her eyes were… too low to be coincidence.

  "If you could hand that to me… and stop looking… I'd appreciate it."

  She tilted her head slightly — with that expression of deliberation I was learning to recognize as the moment between what she thought and what she decided to say.

  "I apologize. I had never seen one so large."

  Silence.

  "We're talking about the wound, right?"

  A pause half a second too long.

  "…Yes."

  I dressed quickly, without elaborating on what that pause had or had not meant. There were battles I chose not to fight.

  "Let's focus on what matters."

  "Yes, Lord."

  But at the corner of her mouth — small, involuntary, disappearing before she decided to let it stay — there was something I hadn't seen since the invocation.

  A smile.

  Not of obedience. Not of courtesy.

  The kind that escapes before the person decides whether to let it.