CHAPTER 236: LESS USELESS

The passage widened as they progressed. The rock became stone again, raw and cold, stripped of the organic dampness of the cavern, but it still bore strange striations, like scratches or furrows left by something too large to have ever belonged to this place.

Every step seemed to echo too loudly, and each person watched their breath so as not to seem to wake what might still be sleeping beneath the rock.

Maggie led the way, halberd raised like a silent torch, her step heavy but assured. Her deep breath filled the silence, a steady rhythm the others followed almost mechanically, as if it were the only pulse still worthy of trust. Her eyes scoured the darkness, and sometimes, very briefly, they rested on Elisa, who walked beside her. There was a tacit alliance in that look, forged in the fire of battle, but also a caution, a wariness that dared not speak its name.

Elisa herself did not speak. Her eyes glimmered at times with a tarnished gold reflection, as if an inner light struggled behind her eyelids. She held her spear with a strange firmness, not as a weapon ready to strike, but as a pilgrim’s staff preventing her from sinking. At her temples, the two lead spheres floated again, more stable than before, tracing slow circles like exiled stars.

Behind them, Zirel struggled. Each step drew a groan from his shattered chest, but he strove to let nothing show. His gaze still burned—not just with fever, but with a calculating fire. He observed Elisa’s gait, noted the fatigue that bowed her shoulders, the way Maggie watched her out of the corner of her eye. And he smiled inwardly, despite the pain, for every weakness was a piece on his future chessboard.

Armin walked at his side, supported by the thief’s grip. His lips moved sometimes, murmuring words no one understood, as if he were still conversing with the beast’s echo. His wide eyes seemed always to be searching for the laughter in the shadows.

Inès brought up almost the rear, her unsteady steps betraying the pain that shot through her with every movement of her bandaged shoulder. Yet she held firm, jaw clenched, the broken crossbow on her back like a useless talisman. She stared fixedly at Elisa’s silhouette ahead, as if this single visual thread was enough to pull her from her stupor.

After a long hour of walking, the tunnel abruptly opened into a vast cavity. The ceiling was lost in darkness, and a breath of sharper air, heavy with moisture, descended upon them. The echo of regularly falling drops resonated like a metronome in the empty chamber.

Maggie raised a fist to halt their progress. She scanned the space ahead, then leaned toward Elisa, her voice a rough murmur:

"It smells like the way out... but something else too."

Elisa closed her eyes. Her lead spheres stopped for an instant in their orbit, vibrating with an imperceptible tremor. When she spoke, it was in a low voice, almost foreign to herself:

"There is wind, yes. But it’s broken. Something blocks the passage... or guards it."

A dense silence followed, in which each felt their heart pound against their wounded ribs. The distant grey light had never seemed so close, nor so inaccessible.

Maggie straightened her halberd and fixed her eyes on Elisa’s.

"Then we clear the path."

And, without waiting for a reply, she took the first step into the cavity, her silhouette swallowed by the shadow, Elisa right behind her, spear pointed into the void.

---

The ground changed beneath their feet. The stone, initially firm and rough, became crumbly, dotted with wet fissures where water seeped in dark streams. The air vibrated, not with a clear noise, but with a dull tension, as if the rock itself remembered a cry too ancient to have faded.

Maggie advanced first, her steps resonating with an almost ritual gravity. Her halberd caught the pale reflections from Elisa’s spheres, as if she carried a spectral flame forward. Every tense muscle in her body breathed of the coming confrontation.

Elisa, just behind, matched her pace, the tip of her spear slightly lowered, ready to rise. The spheres orbited her head in slow circles, casting fleeting gleams on the walls that resembled dead stars.

The rest of the group hung back, each carrying their silence like a burden. Zirel watched, always, his eyes bright in the gloom. Armin murmured to his ghosts. Inès, tense, followed without a word, as if moving forward was already a victory.

Suddenly, a breath rose. Not the expected wind, but a heavy exhalation carrying the acrid smell of rotting flesh. Maggie froze, halberd raised. Elisa planted her feet, her spheres vibrating with a metallic ring.

The sound grew more precise: a scraping, a mass dragging itself, rubbing against the rock. Then, multiple eyes opened in the darkness, reflecting the light like wet pearls.

The thing surged forth.

An elongated body, too supple, half-serpent, half-dog, bristling with bony fangs along its spine. Its clawed paws beat the ground with a syncopated violence, and its maw, torn to its temples, opened on two rows of uneven teeth.

Maggie let out a hoarse grunt and stepped forward. The beast charged immediately. The impact resonated like a drum in the cavern as the shaft of her halberd blocked the fangs, metal grinding under the pressure. Maggie bent her knees, absorbed the blow, her muscles bulging with effort.

With a swift gesture, Elisa raised her spear. Her spheres froze, then shot forth like invisible cannonballs. They struck the creature’s flanks, hurling shards of dark flesh. The beast screamed, a shrill sound that vibrated in their eardrums.

"Hold it!" Elisa called out, her voice burning with a cold fever.

Maggie roared in response and shoved the creature back with a violent thrust, her halberd describing a luminous arc in the half-light. The beast rolled onto its side, its claws gouging the stone, then righted itself with a bound, growling.

From a distance, Elisa whirled her spheres and launched them in a volley. One smashed against a leg, shattering the joint with a dry crack; the other hit the snout, splattering the maw with black blood.

Maggie seized the opening. She leaped forward and drove her blade into the creature’s flank. It writhed in pain, its scream choking into a gurgle.

The fight intensified, rapid, brutal: Maggie at the front, striking, blocking, absorbing; Elisa behind, her spheres cracking like invisible hammers, repelling every attempt by the beast to flank the warrior.

The rest of the group watched, petrified—spectators to a savage choreography where two women bound their strengths, one brawn, the other mind, in a symphony of blows and cries.

The beast finally faltered. Maggie, halberd held high, waited for the final moment, the one where Elisa would offer her the opening. And when the spheres came down to break the creature’s neck with a sinister crunch, Maggie brought her blade down in one clean stroke, piercing its skull.

Silence fell again, thick, disturbed only by the black blood flowing in viscous streams.

Maggie, halberd planted in the corpse, panted. Elisa, spheres trembling at her temples, advanced slowly, staring at the carcass.

She raised a hand. The anima gem shot from the corpse, still imbued with a sickly glow, and floated toward her as if drawn by an invisible gravity. Elisa caught it between her fingers.

The group stood frozen. The silence that followed wasn’t one of victory, but of a stifling discomfort. For they had all seen—they could no longer ignore that Elisa wielded a power that surpassed the understanding of ordinary people like them.

Elisa slowly turned the gem between her fingers. The sickly amber light pulsed weakly, like a heart about to stop. She felt the creature’s raw essence, its primitive and desperate violence, but also its pure, wild life force.

Her eyes lifted and settled on Zirel, who watched her from the shadows, his calculating gaze barely concealing his pain and covetousness. He stood stiffly, trying to mask every spasm from his bruised torso.

Without a word, Elisa approached him. The silence in the cavity was so thick they could hear the black blood dripping from the blade of Maggie’s halberd.

"Here," she said simply, her voice neutral, without warmth or pity.

She offered him the anima gem.

Zirel stared at her, suspicious. His sharp eyes moved from the gem to Elisa’s tired face, searching for the trap, the irony, the hidden debt.

"Why?" he growled, suspicion twisting his pale features. "You killed the beast. The gem is rightfully yours, isn’t it?"

Elisa did not withdraw her hand. Her expression remained stony, but a glimmer of impatience, or perhaps weariness, crossed her golden gaze.

"It’s not charity. It’s logic. You’re wounded, you’re slowing us down. The priority is your recovery." She made a small gesture with the hand holding the gem. "This essence is raw. Unstable. But it can force a body to remember what wholeness is. It can accelerate the process. Make you... less useless."

The words were harsh, almost cruel. But they were true. And it was a language Zirel understood. Transaction. Calculation.

He hesitated another instant, his pride wrestling against a pain so acute it made him nauseous. Then, with calculated slowness, he reached out his good hand and took the gem. Upon contact with his skin, the stone vibrated, and a strange, almost burning heat radiated into his palm.

Zirel looked at the gem in his hand. The amber light seemed to beat in time with his own feverish pulse. He clenched his teeth, then, driven by a despair that surpassed his pride, he closed his fist around it and shut his eyes.

The effect was immediate and violent.

A flash of light burst between his fingers, and a stifled moan escaped him. His hand seemed to catch fire, an intense heat that raced up his arm, burning but not consuming. It spread into his chest, a tidal wave of liquid fire that rushed toward his broken ribs. He felt the bone fragments move, slowly realigning under the push of a titanic force. The pain was excruciating, a white, pure agony that made him see flashes behind his closed eyelids, but it was different. It was a pain of reconstruction, of forced healing, not destruction.

He fell to his knees, breathless, his body shaken by uncontrollable tremors. A wisp of smoke escaped his clenched fist. The smell of ozone and seared flesh briefly replaced that of blood.

Then, it was over.

The light went out. The heat vanished as quickly as it had come, leaving behind a sensation of coolness and... wholeness.