Viola launched into the chamber with the kind of momentum that made restraint look like a personal insult, transformed armor catching the fireball’s light in sharp flashes as she cleared the moss-veiled entrance and drove toward the nearest moving statue.

“It’s about time,” she shouted, grinning with the sort of enthusiasm usually reserved for bad decisions and winning arguments, “for us to get some fun!”

Ludger didn’t even bother telling her that “fun” was an irresponsible description for a guardian chamber full of hostile moss constructs and a twenty-meter trent-golem hybrid trying to decapitate everyone.

Partly because it would be wasted breath. Mostly because the others were already moving too.

Luna came in low and fast, taking a tighter line than Viola and aiming for the side angle immediately, exactly where a smart reinforcement should go instead of piling into the same lane. Eclaire followed with more caution but no hesitation now that the chamber’s hidden threats had made themselves visible. Jennifer and Rowan entered together on a line that made it obvious they were trying not to become separated in the first seconds of the melee.

It swung an oversized arm of bark and stone crust in a brutal horizontal arc meant less to hit cleanly and more to pen him into the main guardian’s whip range. Ludger stepped inside the strike, drove a freezing bolt into the thing’s elbow-joint, and shattered the arm at the bend with a short geomantic spike from below before shifting away from a second incoming lash from the giant guardian.

The broken lesser statue stumbled… And Viola hit it.

She crashed into the thing with a heavy, committed strike that didn’t bother pretending subtlety had ever been an option. The impact echoed through the chamber, sending chunks of moss, bark, and mineral growth flying from the construct’s upper body as it reeled sideways.

“There,” she said with savage satisfaction. “Now it feels like a labyrinth.”

Luna slipped past the same construct’s failing flank a heartbeat later and cut at one of its supporting legs with precise economy, not trying to overpower it like Viola but undermining its balance. The statue buckled further. Rowan immediately saw the opening and drove in from the other angle, adding force where it mattered instead of wasting it on the thickest plating.

Jennifer intercepted another of the lesser constructs trying to angle toward Ludger’s blind side, forcing it to check its advance just enough for Eclaire to reposition. The chamber exploded into layered battle.

The main guardian still towered over everything, howling and lashing with murderous root-whips while ice spread and shattered across its sides under Ludger’s barrage. But now its lesser moss-statues were awake too, stomping forward through the chamber in ugly support patterns meant to overwhelm through numbers and terrain control.

And now Ludger’s team was finally in the fight.

The chamber turned chaotic the moment the lesser moss monsters fully joined the fight. More of the moss creatures reached Viola with a heavy, dragging rush that looked slow right until it committed.

Its body was broad and hunched, almost like a malformed knight built out of bark, stone crust, and wet growth, with one oversized arm thickened into something halfway between a club and a root mass. It swung downward hard enough to crater the floor.

Viola stepped to the outside of the blow and answered with a clean horizontal slash meant to take the thing at the waist. Her blade bit.

It cut through thick moss, through the fibrous outer layer, through a section of bark-plated flesh beneath… and then slowed badly when the denser inner mass resisted.

The slash still tore a deep line through the creature’s middle. Wet green matter and shredded moss spilled free. But instead of collapsing, the monster only lurched sideways and twisted its upper body back toward her with a jerking, ugly motion that ignored how much damage it had just taken.

“Annoying,” Viola muttered.

The wound moved. That was the problem. The torn edges of moss and root matter along the cut shivered, then began to crawl back together in damp pulling strands, as if the thing’s body were trying to stitch itself shut in real time. Luna saw it too.

She slipped behind a second creature that had tried to flank Viola, moving with that same quiet knife-like precision she always carried, and drove both daggers into the back of its leg joint in a crossing strike meant to sever mobility first. The blows landed properly. Thick green-black fluid and shredded growth burst from the punctures. The leg dipped.

Then the creature’s body flexed. Moss flooded back over the damage, tendrils knitting around her daggers fast enough that Luna had to wrench them free immediately before the thing tried to trap the blades in its own flesh.

Across the chamber, Eclaire, Jennifer, and Rowan entered the fight properly. And the moment they did, something became obvious. They summoned their weapons out of mana.

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Not ordinary weapons drawn from belts or carried on their backs, but formed ones, condensed mana taking shape in their hands and hardening into killing tools with speed. Eclaire’s weapon came first, elegant and severe, a slender blade of pale compressed mana that formed with precision. Jennifer shaped a broader sword, sturdier and more practical in profile. Rowan called for a large mana hammer.

The style confirmed what Ludger had already suspected. Rufas. Or at least connection to Rufas’s magic. There was too much shared logic in the way the weapons were formed for that to be coincidence.

That mattered. Just not right now. Because connection or not, the moss monsters did not care whose techniques they were about to be cut apart by.

Jennifer met one head-on, her mana-forged blade cutting diagonally into its torso with a clean strike that should have crippled a lesser construct. The blade carved through layered moss and bark and sent a thick mass of growth spilling loose. Rowan followed from the side with a heavier blow that smashed into the same opening and nearly split the thing’s upper body off balance.

It staggered. It should have fallen. Instead, it convulsed.

Moss surged from its back and shoulder seams, creeping over the wound like a living bandage, while rootlike fibers pulled the half-separated structure back together with nauseating speed.

Jennifer’s brows tightened. “That’s annoying.”

“That’s one word for it,” Rowan said, already moving again.

Eclaire faced a different one with less brute force and more efficiency. She didn’t waste time on the thickest part of the body. Her mana blade flashed for the joints, the neck line, the connection points where root-thick limbs met the torso. She cut one arm cleanly at the elbow and pivoted to slash across the narrowed upper section that passed for a throat.

Both strikes landed beautifully. The severed arm hit the floor. The headline split. Then the chamber’s moss answered.

A thick wave of damp green growth crawled over the cut neck and shoulder, wrapping both injuries in a swarming layer that twitched and compressed until form returned. Even the severed arm on the ground began to shake as tendrils reached from the main body toward it.

Eclaire immediately stepped in and kicked the detached limb farther away before the reconnecting growth could reach it.

Smart. But not enough. The creature still came at her.

Viola cursed once when the same pattern happened on her side. She cut through a monster’s shoulder, then lunged in with a second strike meant to widen the damage and break the entire upper frame apart. The creature took both hits, reeled, leaked moss and pulped plant matter everywhere… and kept swinging.

One heavy arm clipped the edge of her guard and forced her to give ground. Not because it had outskilled her, but because brute mass and regeneration made trading inefficient. She could hurt them. Easily. But hurting them and stopping them were not the same thing.

Luna adapted faster than anyone besides Ludger.

She stopped aiming for “fatal” strikes almost immediately, because fatal had clearly lost its usual meaning in this chamber. Instead, she started breaking rhythm. Hamstringing the leg analogues. Cutting at balance points. Slashing through sensory growths clustered near the upper mass. Severing support roots, dodging back, then stabbing again before the regrowth could fully settle.

It worked better. Not decisively. But better.

One of the creatures dipped hard after she ruined both rear supports on one side, and Rowan took the chance to crash into it with his mana hammer in a brutal overhead attack that smashed the thing’s upper back open almost to the centerline.

Again, it should have gone down. Again, it didn’t.

“That is getting old fast,” Rowan said.

Luna saw one of Jennifer’s damaged targets recovering too quickly and changed levels, diving low under its swinging arm to carve both daggers through the root-thick binders behind its knee. The leg collapsed sideways.

Viola immediately capitalized and drove her blade straight down through the upper torso while it was off balance, pinning the thing to the floor for a heartbeat.

That finally bought space. Not a kill. Just space.

“Say something useful,” Viola snapped toward Ludger’s side of the chamber, still fighting while saying it. “Like how to make these things stop standing back up.”

Ludger, of course, was busy not getting decapitated by a giant trent-whip horror while also freezing pieces off it. He kept moving while he watched.

He watched the giant guardian. He watched the lesser moss beasts.And he watched his allies fighting for ground inside the chamber the way a commander, a teacher, and a very irritated combatant all watched at once.

The pattern became obvious quickly.

Every time one of the smaller monsters took meaningful damage, the moss around the chamber answered. The wounded constructs drew on the room itself to recover, stitching ruined sections back together with the same infuriating persistence as before.

That meant the lesser beasts weren’t the real problem. Or rather, they were a problem, but not the problem. They wouldn’t die properly unless the guardian died first.

The whole chamber was acting like an extension of it. A body beyond the body. A feeding ground. A reserve. The smaller monsters were using all the moss around them to recover, reknit, and resume fighting. As long as the guardian remained active and connected to the room, they were never going to stay down for long.

Ludger’s eyes narrowed behind the mask as he shifted under another incoming lash and let a frozen whip shatter against his forearm guard. At the same time, his attention stayed split enough to keep reading the battlefield.

Then he noticed something else. The guardian was moving backward.

Slowly. Very slowly. Too slowly for most people in the room to register it in the middle of the melee. But Ludger did.

Because he had been tracking its weight and position through Seismic Sense from the start, and the grounded pressure point of the giant thing was no longer holding its exact original line. It was retreating by degrees, stepping back with heavy rooted limbs in a way that barely disturbed the visual shape of the fight.

It was wary of him now.

Worse, it was smart enough to retreat without making the movement obvious. Not a panicked withdrawal. Not some clumsy stomp backward. Just a gradual repositioning meant to preserve distance, keep its whip geometry favorable, and avoid drawing attention to the fact that it had decided Ludger was dangerous enough to warrant caution.

That irritated him more than it should have.