CHAPTER 245: COST OF EVERYTHING

The rumble of the collapse had barely faded when the other battle flared up again, amplified by the confined space. The horned beast, trapped with them, seemed to understand its isolation and drew from it a redoubled rage. Every movement was a hurricane of pure violence.

Maggie felt the change immediately, like a bucket of ice water thrown over the searing embers of her surge. The infernal heat that had driven her for ten minutes—ten minutes already stolen from her own body—began to retract. Not like a flame dying softly, but like molten metal solidifying in an instant, weighing down every limb, every muscle, every bone.

It was worse than fatigue. It was an internal petrification. Her body, a feather swept away by a hurricane just moments earlier, became an anvil. Her arms, which had wielded the halberd with deadly grace, suddenly trembled under the weight of the weapon. She had to grip the shaft with both hands, her numbed fingers struggling to obey.

No. Not yet. Not now.

"Zirel!" she cried, but her voice was nothing more than a guttural rasp, swallowed by the beast’s roar.

The monster, seizing upon the colossus’s brief distraction, fought back with renewed fury. With a sideways jerk of its head, it struck the stone giant in the chest, just above the gaping wound left by its horn. The impact was devastating. A massive block of granite tore free from the colossus’s torso, shattering into a thousand fragments across the ground. The giant staggered, its one good arm loosening its grip for a heartbeat. It was enough.

The beast wrenched itself free in a violent spasm and turned on Elisa, the source of its blindness and frustration. It charged, blind but guided by instinct, its hooves splitting stone as if it were butter.

Maggie saw the danger. She tried to interpose herself, to plant her halberd across its path, but her legs refused to respond. They were too heavy, impossibly heavy. She stumbled, narrowly avoiding a chunk of stone hurled by the shockwave. The world seemed to slow, to whirl. She saw Zirel rushing forward, his sword no more than a needle against the beast’s bulk. She saw Elisa lift her hands, her blue shield flickering erratically, far too weak to hold.

They were going to die. All of it, for nothing.

Despair cut sharper and colder than any weapon she had ever held. It pierced through exhaustion, through doubt, through fear. Only one thing remained: a choice.

To obey logic, to give in to the exhaustion, and die.

Or to shatter herself a second time.

The roar that tore from her lips was not human. It was the cry of glass fracturing, of bone splintering under unbearable pressure. She could no longer feel her feet. They were nothing but dead slabs of flesh chained to her ankles. It didn’t matter.

She plunged inward, down where the source of her inhuman strength beat, that core of pain and power that had already taken so much. Only a coal remained, a dying spark at the bottom of an ash-filled pit.

She breathed on it.

And set it ablaze.

It wasn’t flame that erupted, but an earthquake. A silent, absolute detonation radiating from her center, obliterating the last vestiges of her fatigue. The pain was so immense, so total, it transcended itself—becoming a pure white sensation that annihilated thought. Her blood became naphtha in her veins. Her muscles coiled into knots of electric agony. Her vision collapsed into a crimson tunnel edged with black.

This was the last reserve. The last breath. She had broken the hourglass.

In return, movement came back. A nightmare speed, even more frantic, even more desperate than before. The speed of something that knew it was already dead and had nothing left to lose.

She didn’t run. She streaked.

Her body became a line of shadow and steel. The halberd, driven by this suicidal strength, became a meteor. She struck the beast’s flank before Zirel could even finish his step. She didn’t aim. She lashed.

The blade, fueled by the self-destructive fury burning through her, bit into the thick hide with a wet, satisfying crack. This was no scratch. This was a wound, a deep gash that burst open in a spray of black, stinking blood. The beast bellowed, shocked by the sudden violence, its charge swerving just enough to miss Elisa, who collapsed to her knees, her shield dissolving.

The beast turned on this new pain, this pest that had turned into a flaming wasp. Maggie was already gone, vaulting onto a heap of rubble, launching herself with legs that felt borrowed, and struck again, targeting the same point, carving deeper with brutal precision.

"COME GET ME!" she howled, her voice warped into something not her own.

The beast forgot Zirel, forgot Elisa. It saw nothing but this burning little tormentor. It roared, drool dripping in putrid strands, and lunged.

Maggie drew it on. Every step was agony, every heartbeat a hammer strike threatening to burst her chest. But she danced with death, one last macabre waltz. She dodged a hoof that gouged a crater into the floor where she had stood, the shockwave flinging her backward. She rolled, rose before she even touched ground, and struck again, hacking into a tendon on its hind leg.

The beast staggered, its roar turning into a guttural snarl of rage. It lashed blindly, horns ripping through the air, smashing the cavern walls, widening the trap around them.

Zirel, regaining his senses, understood instantly. Maggie was hanging by a single burning thread, one that could snap at any moment. They had to finish it. Now.

"The giant!" he barked to Elisa. "Everything into the giant! Now!"

Elisa, pale and shaking, nodded. She clasped her hands, closed her eyes, and every light around her—the green, the blue—died, converging into a single filament of pure white energy. It struck the stone colossus square in the chest.

The giant, slumped and crumbling, seemed to awaken. The runes etched in its body, dull and broken, lit up one by one, pulsing with agonized but fierce light. Its one good arm rose. Its other, limp and shattered, lifted too—dragged up by an impossible effort, as if pulled by invisible chains.

The beast, focused on Maggie, did not see. Maggie did. She made one last effort, feigned a fall, luring the monster to lean down, to expose its massive, corded neck.

That was the signal.

With a groan like the breaking of the world’s foundation, the stone giant hurled itself forward one last time. It didn’t try to strike. It wrapped the beast in an embrace, locking its stone fingers tight as the monster screamed, pummeling its belly with hooves, tearing away its last runes of light.

"MAGGIE!" Zirel roared.

He didn’t need to finish. She was already in the air. She had burned the final remnants of her essence, the last spark of her life, to leap higher than ever before. She rose, her body ablaze, her halberd lifted overhead—not to slice, but to plunge.

She fell like a meteor, guided by fury and despair. The halberd’s blade struck, not the beast’s hardened hide, but the wound carved into the colossus’s chest by its horn, the rent that exposed its inner core, the fragile runes powering it.

Steel met stone and magic with a shriek.

And there, in the heart of the giant, Maggie made it all explode.

The core of magic that kept the colossus standing was vast, but stable. Her weapon, saturated with her suicidal energy, became the spark.

Light erupted. A cold, white sun bloomed in the cavern. Then sound—a howl that belonged to neither stone nor beast, but both, the scream of matter and magic disintegrating.

The colossus exploded.

It was not fire, but force. Thousands of granite shards, each hurled by the collapsing runes’ energy, tore outward like the fragments of a titanic grenade.

The horned beast, crushed in its grip, took the full blast. Shards the size of arms ripped through its flank, its chest, its throat. It was lifted, flung back like a ragdoll, its body shredded by stone and shockwave alike, crashing into the cavern wall with a grotesque crack of bone and flesh.

Maggie, at the epicenter, was tossed aside like straw.

She flew, her body already broken from within offering no resistance. She struck the ground a dozen meters away, rolling lifelessly until she lay flat on her back, in a pool of dust and her own blood.

Silence fell. Heavy, thick, almost as violent as the chaos that had preceded it.

Only the drip of falling pebbles and the beast’s final, ragged, dying wheeze disturbed the ruin.

Zirel rose slowly, sheltered under a rock overhang. Elisa crouched sobbing, trembling with terror and exhaustion.

He rushed to Maggie.

She lay there, eyes wide open, staring at the dark ceiling above. Blood trickled from her mouth and nose. Her skin was pale, waxen. The fury that had burned in her was gone, leaving behind only an empty, shattered shell. The heat coming from her was no longer that of a raging core, but the faint, flickering warmth of a life clinging desperately.

He knelt, pressing his hand to her neck.

A pulse. Weak, erratic, horrifyingly faint. But there.

Across the cavern, the horned beast shuddered once, let out a final rasping breath, and went still.

They had won.

At the cost of everything.

Zirel gripped Maggie’s shoulder, speechless. They remained there, amid the rubble and the corpses of two titans, victorious, alive—but terribly alone. Maggie’s countdown was over. Now it was only a question of whether she had burned just enough... or too much.