CHAPTER 227: HIDDEN SUNS

Armin’s POV

The pain crushing his arm was a white-hot burn, an obsession that consumed every thought. Armin gritted his teeth, fighting not to sink into unconsciousness, each beat of the creature’s core resonating like a hammer on his fractured arm. Through a veil of tears and sweat, he saw his companions lying broken. Despair, thick and slimy, threatened to swallow him.

Then, the atmosphere changed.

It wasn’t a sound, but a new silence, heavier than the moans. A silence charged with murderous intent. Armin painfully raised his head.

He saw Maggie, standing upright like a standing stone, take her halberd. And he saw Elisa transform.

Her eyes. Those golden, soft eyes he knew, which he’d sometimes caught laughing by the campfire, were now two burning suns, implacable, inhuman. The air around her crackled, and the lead pellets were now just dancing grey streaks. Armin felt a weight form in his chest, different from the pain. One of disbelief. Of betrayal.

*Why?* The thought erupted, raw, amidst the agony. *They had that... all this time?*

Then chaos exploded.

There was no signal, no war cry. Maggie and Elisa moved like two arms of the same body. Elisa pointed her spear, and a tentacle was reduced to shreds by an invisible force. Before the scraps of flesh had even finished falling, Maggie was already there, her weapon sweeping through the air with a nauseating shriek. Another tentacle flew, severed with obscene neatness.

Armin, dumbfounded, forgot his pain. He was witnessing a deadly, perfect choreography, where each movement of one answered and prepared for the other’s.

The creature, panicked, tried to retaliate. A tentacle regrew, a pale imitation of the last, and attempted to replicate Maggie’s halberd strike. Armin held his breath, expecting to see her pulverized. Instead, she planted her weapon in the ground and *absorbed* the shock. The ground cracked under her feet, but she didn’t move. She smiled.

"My turn," she growled.

And it was Elisa’s turn. As Maggie struck again, reducing the tentacle to mist, Elisa advanced, her hands stretched toward the core. Armin saw the mass of molten lead crash against the amber light. The impact made no sound, but it reverberated in Armin’s skull like a gong strike. The creature screamed, a sound that belonged to no known world.

It was insane. It was terrifying. It was magnificent.

*They let us get massacred,* he thought, rage mixing with forced admiration. *Zirel has his ribs caved in, Inès is impaled, my arm is in pieces... and they had this power. Why wait? Why let us do it? Because they didn’t want us to know?*

The creature, wounded, became unpredictable. Its tentacles struck out wildly, no longer with calculation, but with the blind fury of a cornered beast. A massive appendage, covered in pulsating suckers, swooped down on Elisa from behind as she concentrated her power on the core.

Armin opened his mouth to shout a warning, but he was too weak, too slow.

Maggie, however, was not.

Without even turning her head, as if she sensed the threat in the very air, she pivoted on her heels. The halberd described a perfect arc, not to strike the tentacle, but to deflect it. The tip of the weapon hooked the slimy member with surgical precision, diverting it by just a few degrees. Enough for it to crash a finger’s breadth from Elisa, pulverizing the rock at her feet.

Elisa, interrupted, didn’t even flinch. Her gaze met Maggie’s for a microsecond. A nod. Nothing more. And she resumed her concentration, as if a mortal attack grazing her side was a foreseen and already managed event.

Armin watched them, his heart pounding. Their powers were monstrous, but it was their synergy that was truly supernatural. They didn’t communicate. They *knew*. They moved through the combat space as if they shared the same consciousness, anticipating each movement, covering each other’s blind spots.

Maggie became the bulwark, a mobile and furious fortress. Her halberd was a whirlwind of metal and pure force, parrying, deflecting, absorbing every attempt at a counter-attack from the creature. She no longer sought to slash, but to control the space, to create a deadly safe zone around Elisa.

And Elisa was the lance. Motionless at the center of the storm Maggie was unleashing, she concentrated all her energy on the core. Under her outstretched fingers, the air vibrated. The amber light of the core began to waver, to flicker erratically. Cracks, not physical but made of pure shadow, began to streak across its surface. The creature thrashed, but every time it tried to strike the source of this new agony, Maggie was there, receiving the shock, returning it, forcing it back.

Armin understood now. This thing fed on physical force, sent it back, absorbed it. But what Elisa and Maggie were unleashing... it wasn’t force. It was something else. A falsification. An alteration of reality itself. The creature couldn’t understand it, and therefore couldn’t send it back. It could only suffer it.

They weren’t fighting the creature. They were unmaking it.

And as he watched them, these two women he thought he knew, Armin felt a cold more glacial than his fracture wash over him. They had this power. They had always had it. And they had hidden it. Until their backs were against the wall. Until their companions’ blood had been spilled.

The question burned in him, more painful than his arm: what are they really? And what will happen to us now that they no longer have a reason to hide?

---

The creature was nothing but a screaming, mutilated thing, a deposed king at the center of its court of torn flesh and pulverized rock. Under the coordinated assault of Elisa and Maggie, its very nature seemed to unravel. It no longer sent blows back; it absorbed them, suffered them, disintegrated.

Armin, his back against the cold wall, watched them, hypnotized and horrified. Maggie was a pillar of contained rage. Every time a tentacle made a last-ditch attempt to attack, she was there, her halberd a reddish flash that parried, slashed, crushed. She didn’t shout, didn’t roar. Her face was just a mask of murderous concentration, her bulging muscles taut like steel cables under her skin. She was the anchor, the immovable rock upon which the beast’s last spasms broke.

And Elisa... Elisa was the storm.

Her hands, stretched towards the pulsating core, seemed to grasp it from a distance. The veins on her temples throbbed to the frantic rhythm of the faltering amber light. The air between her fingers crackled, charged with an energy that made the humidity sizzle and Armin’s teeth vibrate. She was murmuring words no one could understand, a low, continuous litany that sealed the creature’s fate.

The core cracked with a sound of glass shattering into a thousand pieces, but muffled, as if from very far away. The light exploded inward, then died in a final whimper. The creature’s mass collapsed in on itself, like a wineskin emptied of its blood, becoming mere inert, slimy flesh.

In the sudden, deafening silence that followed, only the residual crackling around Elisa’s hands persisted. At the center of the carcass, where the core had been, an oblong gem of deep, cloudy amber glowed faintly.

Without a word, Elisa held out a hand, palm to the sky. The gem vibrated, detached itself from the dead flesh, and flew through the air in a perfectly controlled motion to land in her palm. She closed her hand over it, and the last vestige of energy around her vanished. Her eyes returned to their usual gold, but ringed with extreme fatigue. Maggie, breathing heavily, planted the butt of her halberd in the ground and leaned against it, her chest heaving.

The relief was short-lived for Armin. The pain in his arm came rushing back, but it was immediately surpassed by a wave of bitter questions. He opened his mouth, words of reproach and confusion about to burst forth. *Why? How? Since when?*

But it was Zirel who spoke first.

The group leader, his face pale and covered in blood, one hand clamped over his bruised torso, straightened up with a grunt of pain. His gaze met Elisa’s, then settled on the gem in her hand. There was a heavy silence, during which Armin thought he saw—almost heard—a silent conversation, a black-market deal passing between their looks.

Then Zirel took a painful breath and raised his voice, enough for the surviving soldiers and Inès, who was moaning weakly, to hear.

"Dame Elisa," he said, his voice hoarse but clear, tinged with feigned disapproval. "You finally used your powers. Even knowing they are strictly forbidden by the Guild."

He paused, letting the words settle in the cavern. Armin felt a chill run through him. It was a lie. A shameless, perfectly orchestrated lie.

Zirel bowed his head in a theatrical posture of contrition. "I am sorry. Sorry for being so weak, for letting us be driven to this point. I am solely responsible. I forced you to transgress our laws to save us. The fault will be attributed to you, but the responsibility, the shame, falls on me."