Emma reached the tank, and decided to engage first.

"I will take the front!"

"Okay."

Emma’s daggers began to search for the gaps in his plate. The tank caught the first strike on the haft of his hammer and swept the second aside with a heavy backhand.

His armor did its job as Emma’s blades scraped across the plate and drew no immediate blood.

Moon came in behind her, his sword already moving towards the joint between the Surpasser’s helm and pauldron. The Surpasser turned into the strike, catching Moon’s blade on the reinforced ridge of his hammer’s head.

The clash rang across the rubble.

Moon could see it in his eyes, the attack had gave him a great deal of pain, even if he managed to defend against it.

The Surpasser pressed back. Moon didn’t stay in the exchange, stepping back.

His sword lit up in purple lightning that shot forward, catching the Surpasser across the chest plate. The armor absorbed most of the current but enough seeped through to make the Surpasser grunt and his stance rock backward by a step.

Emma slipped inside during the exchange.

Ptui!

Her dagger penetrated into the underside of his arm, past the plate, into the gap the raised guard had exposed. The Surpasser’s hammer arm dropped as his grip loosened.

His counter-swing missed her by half a meter.

Moon took his chance and closed the distance again, activating Tempest Symphony. The strikes spread across his field of vision, overwhelming him in in an instant.

He tried to block, but the sheer number and power behind the attacks were too much to handle. Not to mention the phantom strikes that made him catch several real hits in the process.

"Damn it! What are those strikes! Why are they no different than real ones!"

Blood ran from beneath his pauldron, from the gap at his elbow, from the underside of his helm where the visor met the neck plate.

The tank staggered, his hammer rushing down in a desperate two handed strike aimed at Moon’s head.

Before he could do so, Emma’s dagger thrust into the back of his knee.

His legs buckled, and his hammer missed. At the same time, Moon’s sword came around and drove into the gap between the neck plate and the underside of the helm, punching through the vulnerable joint in a single clean thrust.

The Surpasser dropped to the ground, his hammer hitting the rubble a heartbeat before his body did.

Thud!

Dust from the rubble exploded into the air from the massive weight of the hammer, easily weighing over 225 lbs.

Moon pulled the sword free.

The notification flashed.

[You have gained 20,510 Lives]

He glanced at Emma. Her chest was heaving, her braid was destroyed, and her clothes smeared with fresh blood, yet she was grinning.

"Good job."

"You too."

Moon and Emma returned to support the others and immediately began carving through what was left of the reinforcement waves.

The dark organization’s numbers had thinned considerably. Baaron’s earlier order to converge on Moon’s position had committed most of the remaining assets to a corridor that was now littered with their bodies.

Between Moon’s new frost pillars, Emma’s team holding the outer edges, and the two of them working the center, the flow of reinforcements had gone from a strong push to a disorganized retreat that left many of them dead.

Two more Surpassers tried to break through in the next ninety seconds.

Neither made it past Moon and Emma.

The first one committed to a direct engagement, likely under the assumption that the transformation Moon was running would be running out any second. He caught a Tempest Symphony sequence to the chest, multiple bolts of lightning and an Explode spell that made him fall to the ground.

Yoha closed on the injured Surpasser from the flank while Moon’s strikes broke his defense. The combined pressure ensured his death.

[You have gained 19,783 Lives]

The second tried to be smarter. She engaged Moon at range, launching a series of daggers from behind massive building rubble, hoping to soften him up before closing in.

Emma flanked her position from the eastern side. Moon’s lightning came in from the front. The Surpasser was caught between two sides and taken apart in under a minute.

Nearly a hundred Evolvers died alongside them across the two-minute window. Three-Stars, Four-Stars, and Five-Stars. Anyone who was in the proximity of Moon or Emma’s position joined the growing pile of bodies scattered across the arena’s central section.

The lives poured in.

Moon’s lives pool climbed at a rate that would have been staggering if he had time to look at it properly. The dark organization’s system of pre-draining their fighters’ life pools was still limiting his gains per kill, but the sheer volume compensated for the reduced individual returns. Every Surpasser was worth close to twenty thousand lives. Every Five-Star was worth around fifteen thousand.

Every Four-Star was worth a couple thousand.

The total climbed towards six figures within the first minute.

By the end of the second minute, his new gains were well over a hundred thousand.

He kept moving.

Then Moon’s internal clock pinged him. Only two and a half minutes remained on Life Burn.

He glanced up from his fight for the first time in what felt like ages. The engagements around him were winding down.

The dark organization had lost their momentum. The reinforcements that had been converging on his position had either been destroyed or had pulled back to defensive lines further out. Their forces were being ground down piece by piece.

Moon made a quick calculation.

He needed to be out of active combat by the thirty-second mark. Life Burn’s aftermath would leave him unable to defend himself, and the long period of agonizing recovery afterward would leave him effectively paralyzed. Anyone who wanted him dead would have a long window to walk up and finish the job without any hassle.

He couldn’t be near active enemies when that window opened.

Which meant he had two minutes of active combat left. Maybe two and ten seconds if he pushed his margins.