The creature shrieked, a sound of pure agony. The thrust didn't stop there, impacting its actual, pale chest. Where the light hit, the ghostly flesh seemed to vaporise, leaving behind a smoking, fist-sized hole of nothingness in its core. The creature stumbled back ten feet, its form flickering violently, parts of its translucent skin threatening to dissolve entirely.
It was hurt. Badly. The two steps of the Holy Sword Formation had stripped away its ethereal defences and dealt significant, burning damage to its physical form.
The creature was no longer circling. It was shaking violently, its lantern eyes fixed on Valeria with a gaze of pure, focused malice. The death energy surrounding it flared, a sign that the creature was about to unleash a devastating counterattack.
It threw its head back and released a massive, sustained shriek that contained not just sound, but raw, unfiltered death energy. The sound wave hit Valeria, slamming into her like a physical battering ram, forcing her to brace her feet and push her Holy Aura to its absolute limit to avoid being crushed.
The shadow guards behind her fared worse; two of them were violently thrown against a ruined truck, collapsing unconscious. Only three remained functional, desperately maintaining their focus to fire enchanted arrows.
Valeria knew this was the turning point. She had wounded it, but now the creature was cornered and desperate. Its next attack would be overwhelming. She needed to end it quickly, before her reserves ran dry, and before the beast could truly corrupt the environment around them.
She transitioned into the third and most complex part of the formation. Even though she hadn't learned it very well
The Holy Sword Formation: Part Three - The Seraph's Cage
Valeria raised the Grandmaster's Sword above her head, pointing the tip toward the heavens. The light emanating from her body ceased being an aura and began to coalesce around the sword, pulling the surrounding ambient holy energy into its vortex. Runes of pure gold, complex and ancient, began to trace themselves down her sword arm, momentarily burning her skin with their power.
She had to maintain absolute stillness and concentration. The creature, sensing the immense energy gathering, charged one last, desperate time, its claws aimed for a tearing, fatal strike.
"Valeria!" the remaining shadow guards yelled, realising she was immobilised by the complexity of the technique.
The creature was four feet away, then two. Valeria closed her eyes, ignoring the searing pain in her arm, the physical strain of gathering so much power.
Not yet. Wait.
The creature's claws were inches from her face.
NOW.
Valeria threw her sword arm down, not striking the creature, but plunging the tip of the Grandmaster's Sword into the ground beneath her feet.
"Seraph's Cage: Confinement!"
As the sword touched the earth, the complex golden runes rushed off her body and exploded outward across the ground, racing toward the creature like molten gold spreading across black ink. The runes intersected, forming a glowing, three-dimensional geometric lattice of pure, binding light, a cage that sprang up from the earth and encapsulated the charging creature.
The creature slammed into the wall of light, screaming a noise of total defeat and agony. The Seraph's Cage didn't physically crush it; it locked it down, preventing it from using its phasing ability, its speed, or its death energy. It was pure, holy stasis.
The ghostly Null thrashed violently inside the cage, the light instantly burning away all the coiling black smoke. Its translucent skin turned transparent, revealing only a dense, black core where its soul should have been. The creature was trapped, neutralised, and slowly being purified by the continuous, blinding light of the holy formation.
Valeria leaned heavily on the hilt of the sword, breathing hard, the strain evident on her face. Her power was almost completely spent, her body drained by the complex sequence. But the creature was defeated.
For a moment, silence reigned, broken only by Valeria's heavy, ragged breathing and the sizzling of the cage.
The sound of the museum doors slamming shut behind her was a physical shock, the final, terrifying punctuation mark to the battle with the ghostly Null. The ensuing silence was heavier and more profound than any battle cry. The figure that had stood in the doorway, the one wielding the scythe, was gone.
The immense wave of death energy, which had just assaulted Valeria's mind, dissipated instantly. She stumbled, collapsing to one knee, utterly drained. Her chest heaved, every breath burning, but she forced herself to stand, leaning heavily on the Grandmaster's Sword.
"Amara…?" Valeria whispered, her voice rough and unsteady.
She scanned the dark foyer. The floor was still slick with the residue of the ghostly Null's corruption, but the overpowering aura of death energy was now concentrated inside the museum. It pulsed, slow and rhythmic, like a colossal, dying heart.
Valeria didn't wait. The exhaustion and fear were instantly overridden by her commitment to Amara. She pushed through the doors, the hinges groaning as they protested the movement.
Inside, the vast, circular hall of the museum was plunged into almost total darkness, illuminated only by the faint, eerie glow of hundreds of display cases lining the walls. The air here was heavy and cold, the temperature dropping several degrees below freezing, a terrifying stillness replacing the chaos of the fight.
In the centre of the hall, where a grand, spiral staircase should have been, the floor was cracked and splintered. And there, lying in a small circle of disturbed marble, was Amara.
The sight made Valeria gasp, the air catching sharply in her already painful lungs.
Amara was utterly still, her body draped awkwardly. A massive scythe, a weapon of impossible size, its wicked blade shimmering with an aura of raw, world-ending darkness, was embedded in the floor, its haft rising up and seemingly glued to Amara's right hand.
Valeria rushed forward, casting her Holy Aura around her out of sheer instinct. The moment the white light touched the scythe, the weapon thrummed with a deep, furious malice. Valeria ignored the hostility and knelt beside her friend.
Amara's clothes were ripped, her body streaked with grime, but her features were strangely peaceful. The terrifying darkness that had briefly consumed her was gone, yet the death energy was still very much present, seeping into the stone beneath her.
Valeria reached out, her hands trembling, and placed two fingers on Amara's throat. There was no pulse.
A wave of crushing despair threatened to drag Valeria down, but then she shifted her hand to Amara's chest. Her fingers pressed against the cold skin, and she felt it, a faint, slow, almost agonizingly deliberate thump… thump… thump. Amara's heart was beating.
But the rest of her body was unnaturally cold, radiating a deep, pervasive chill that soaked into Valeria's bones despite her holy energy. It was the absolute cold of the grave.
The scythe was the culprit. It was physically lodged in Amara's grasp, its darkness leeching her warmth and her vitality, yet simultaneously maintaining that slow, impossible rhythm in her chest. The weapon hadn't been defeated; it had claimed its master and was now holding her in a terrifying state of suspension between life and death.
"Damn you, system," Valeria muttered through gritted teeth, thinking of the system that had sent Amara on this perilous mission to complete her Class Up. "What kind of weapon is this?"
She gently tried to pry Amara's fingers from the scythe, but the grip was locked, like rigor mortis accelerated by dark power. The metal was unnaturally cold, burning her holy-infused skin. She realised trying to separate Amara from the weapon right now would likely kill her instantly.
"Shadow Guards!" Valeria yelled, her voice echoing in the vast, tomb-like hall. "Get in here! Now!"
The remaining two functional guards, hesitantly, peered through the doors, their crossbows raised.
"Two of you. Gently. Get a stretcher. We are taking her back to the Guild. Do not touch the scythe," Valeria instructed, her voice firm despite her exhaustion.
While the guards moved carefully to secure Amara's body, treating her with the reverence of a fragile artefact, Valeria took a moment to look around the hall. The surrounding display cases were what had caused the pulse of energy they had felt earlier. Every artefact, from broken pottery shards to tarnished medieval armour, glowed with a faint, intermittent internal light, pulsing in rhythm with the residual death energy.
"All those artefacts," Valeria realised aloud. "They are all steeped in the energy of this place. They are all drawing in power."
She drew her Grandmaster's Sword again, using the light from the blade to illuminate a case closer to the wall. Inside, resting on a velvet cushion, was a small, elongated crystal. It was no bigger than her index finger and glowed with a pure, concentrated golden light, contrasting sharply with the death energy filling the room.
It seemed familiar. Intuitively, Valeria reached out, ignoring the case's shattered glass. The moment her fingers closed around the crystal, a faint but distinct humming resonated from her Grandmaster's Sword.
She looked down at the sword. Just above the hilt, where the runes began, there was a tiny, recessed opening in the metalwork, a cavity she had never noticed before. The golden crystal, the size and shape of a finger, looked like it was meant to fit perfectly into that space.
A power source? A key?
Valeria kept the crystal safely tucked into a pouch, recognising that whatever its function, it was too important to leave here.