The first demon reached the chokepoint and died there.

Anaya’s position had been chosen well. The narrow gap where the ridge curved inward forced anything moving through it into a line, stripping away the numbers advantage the splinter group might have used against open ground. The lead demon — a low-grade thing, more animal instinct than intelligence, its body a compact mass of grey-black hide with claws that looked more suited to digging than fighting — barely had time to register the bottleneck before Anaya’s spell caught it.

A focused lance of compressed wind, narrow enough to punch through hide rather than simply battering it, the kind of spell that traded raw power for precision and rewarded exactly the kind of terrain she had selected.

The demon dropped.

The second one behind it adjusted, trying to widen its approach around the body, and found the gap too narrow to accommodate the correction. It hesitated for half a second.

Half a second was enough.

Anaya’s second cast caught it through the throat.

"Two," Daveon called from his flanking position, not because the count mattered yet but because the habit was too ingrained to suppress even under pressure.

"I heard," Damon said. He was watching the wider field beyond the chokepoint, where the rest of the splinter group was beginning to spread, several of them peeling away from the direct corridor approach to test the terrain on either side.

Smarter than the first two.

"They’re flanking," Celeste called from the rise.

"I see it."

Three of the demons had broken from the main cluster, moving to circle around the ridge’s outer edge where the chokepoint’s advantage didn’t apply. Damon read their positioning quickly — Grade Five by the density of their presence, more coordinated than the lead pair had been, moving with the kind of awareness that suggested actual tactical thought rather than pure instinct.

"Daveon, take the left flank," Damon said. "Celeste, hold your sightline but watch for anything trying to use your blind spot behind the rise."

"Copy."

Daveon was already moving, covering the ground toward the flanking demons with the controlled speed that characterized his fighting style — not the fastest among them, but efficient, every motion serving the next position rather than wasted on display.

Damon moved to support Anaya at the chokepoint.

The main cluster was still funneling through the narrow gap, but the bodies were piling at the entrance now, creating their own obstacle that the following demons had to navigate around or over. Anaya adjusted her casting rhythm to account for it, switching from the narrow lance technique to something with a wider spread that could catch multiple targets navigating the same congested space.

It worked for the third and fourth demons.

The fifth one was faster than the pattern suggested and got through the gap before her spell formed.

"Behind you," Damon said, already moving.

Anaya spun, her defensive ward flaring up just in time to absorb the demon’s first strike, the impact driving her back a step but holding. Damon closed the remaining distance and drove his blade through the creature’s side before it could press the advantage, the strike clean but not perfectly placed — it staggered the demon without finishing it.

It turned on him instead.

He took the follow-up on his forearm guard, the impact jarring but manageable, and used the opening created by the demon’s overextension to drive his second strike home. This one found the core’s general location and the demon dropped.

"That’s mine," he said.

"Barely," Anaya said, resetting her stance. "I softened it."

"Doesn’t count against confirmed kill rules."

"We’re really doing this."

"We agreed to it."

She didn’t argue further, mostly because the sixth and seventh demons were already through the gap and the conversation had used time better spent elsewhere.

Across the corridor, Daveon’s flank engagement had developed into something more demanding than the initial assessment suggested. The three demons he was facing were working together in a way that the academy’s combat instruction had specifically warned against underestimating — not the chaotic clustering of low-intelligence demons, but a genuine coordinated pressure, one demon committing to an attack while the other two positioned to exploit whatever opening the defense produced.

He took a strike to the shoulder managing the first exchange, the pauldron absorbing most of it but the impact still rocking him sideways.

He recovered, found his footing, and read the pattern they were running.

Predictable, once identified. He let the next coordinated attack develop, allowed himself to seem caught by the setup, and then broke the pattern at the precise moment the third demon committed to what should have been the finishing blow.

His counter caught it mid-motion.

One down.

The remaining two adjusted, the coordination disrupted by the loss, and Daveon pressed the advantage before they could reestablish it. It wasn’t clean. He took another graze across his side from the second demon’s claws before he managed to put it down, and the third one nearly got past his guard entirely before Celeste’s spell from the rise caught it from an angle he hadn’t seen developing.

"That one’s mine," she called.

"It was already weakened by my counter," Daveon called back.

"Doesn’t matter. I delivered the killing blow."

"We’re using the same rules as Damon and Anaya’s argument?"

"We didn’t agree to anything. I’m just stating facts."

Daveon didn’t have a good response to that, mostly because she wasn’t wrong and partly because two more demons were already approaching his position from the main cluster, having broken off once the chokepoint’s bottleneck had thinned the group enough to make individual approaches viable.

The corridor’s engagement had developed into something messier than the initial clean lines of the opening exchanges. The splinter group’s numbers had thinned considerably — Anaya’s chokepoint and Damon’s support had accounted for most of the central approach, Daveon and Celeste had handled the flanking attempt — but what remained had scattered into smaller, harder-to-track engagements across the wider terrain.

Damon found himself fighting two demons simultaneously near the chokepoint’s mouth, the bodies of the earlier kills creating uneven footing that complicated every exchange.

He managed the first with a clean entry, his blade finding the gap in its defensive posture and ending the engagement in two exchanges.

The second was faster.

It came in low, beneath his guard’s natural coverage, and he had to abandon the clean technique he had been using and rely on raw reaction to avoid the strike entirely. He twisted, took a shallow graze across his ribs that registered as heat rather than immediate pain, and brought his blade around in a wide arc that caught the demon’s exposed flank.

It staggered but didn’t drop.

He pressed the advantage and finished it with a second strike.

He was breathing harder now. The engagement had been running for several minutes without significant pause, and even with the conditioning his training had provided, sustained combat at this intensity drew on reserves that didn’t refill themselves mid-fight.

"Status," he called, scanning the field.

"Clear on the flank," Daveon responded. "Two more visible, moving toward the open ground east of us."

"Chokepoint’s thinning," Anaya said. "Three left in the funnel, then it should be clear."

Celeste’s voice carried a different quality. "I’ve got movement on the rise. Something’s circling wide, trying to come around behind me."

Damon’s attention sharpened. "How many?"

"One, that I can see. Could be more I’m not tracking."

"Hold position. I’m coming."

"I can handle one."

"I’m coming anyway."

He moved toward Celeste’s position, cutting across the corridor’s open ground rather than retracing the path along the chokepoint. The terrain here was less favorable — no natural bottleneck, no advantage of position, just open space between the ridge and the broader field.

It was while crossing that open space that he miscounted.

He had read the field as mostly clear, the bulk of the splinter group accounted for between Anaya’s chokepoint kills and the flanking engagement Daveon and Celeste had managed.

What he had not accounted for was the small cluster that had broken off earlier, circled wide through terrain none of them had been watching closely, and was now converging on the open ground precisely where he was crossing it.

Four demons.

Not three. Not the manageable two-against-one ratio that the group’s combined experience could handle without significant strain.

Four, closing from multiple angles simultaneously, the coordination between them suggesting they had been positioning for exactly this moment rather than randomly scattering.

He registered the mistake too late to fully correct for it.

The first strike came from his left, faster than he expected, and he managed to deflect it but the deflection put him off-balance for the second attack arriving from directly ahead. He twisted to avoid the worst of it and took a glancing hit across his upper arm that would have been worse if his reinforcement hadn’t absorbed most of the impact.

He found his footing.

Tried to create distance.

The third and fourth demons had already closed the gap he was trying to open, their positioning cutting off the retreat path he had instinctively reached for.

He was surrounded.

Not in the abstract sense. Genuinely surrounded, four Grade Five demons positioned at angles that left no clean direction to move without exposing himself to at least two of them simultaneously, the open ground offering nothing in the way of terrain advantage to compensate for the numbers.

He had told himself, in the calm moments before the engagement started, that three against one was overkill for their current capability.

He had been right about that assessment.

This was worse than overkill.

"Damon!" Celeste’s voice, sharp with the particular alarm of someone who had just turned and seen exactly what he was looking at.

He didn’t have time to respond.

The first demon committed to its strike, and Damon moved to meet it, already calculating the brutal mathematics of what came next — that managing four simultaneous angles of attack with the techniques that had carried him through everything before this moment was not going to be possible through skill alone.

He was going to need something else.

And he had no idea, in the half-second before the demon’s claws reached him, what that something else was going to be.