The damaged golem struggles to stabilize, its remaining arm digging into the lakebed as it tries to regain balance. The shield-bearing golem shifts forward again, fragments of broken stone still falling from its arm as it reforms portions of its structure.
The currents intensify.
The Drakolimne moves.
Its massive body uncoils.
Slow at first—
Then suddenly.
The water erupts around it as it lunges forward, its enormous form displacing entire sections of the lake. Its tail whips behind it, smashing through ruins, sending debris spiraling upward in massive clouds.
Its target is clear.
The advancing giants.
The lake becomes a battlefield.
And it is no longer contained.
The Drakolimne lunges forward.
It does not glide.
It tears through the water.
Its massive body uncoils in a single violent motion, newly healed scales grinding against one another with a sound that reverberates like stone dragged across stone. As it surges, those scales scrape against the surrounding ruins, carving lines into ancient pillars, shearing chunks of rock loose that spiral upward in slow, tumbling arcs before vanishing into murk. The water around it distorts under its speed, folding and compressing as if struggling to keep up.
The remaining golems meet it head-on.
They do not hesitate.
They drive forward with brute force, arms pushing through the crushing pressure, legs grinding into the lakebed hard enough to fracture what remains of the ruins beneath them. Their movements are slower than on land, but each motion carries overwhelming mass, unstoppable in intent if not in speed.
Then—
The disconnected third golem arrives near Teufel's healing platform.
It emerges from the haze of drifting silt like something dragged out of a nightmare. Its form is uneven now, misaligned compared to the others. Segments of its body shift too late or too early, as if following a rhythm no longer synchronized.
Its eyes glow darker than before.
Not dimmer.
Darker.
A dense, unnatural shade that absorbs the faint blue light around it instead of reflecting it. Something in its presence feels wrong, not just uncontrolled—but altered.
Almost corrupted.
Hano does not notice.
His focus is still locked on the two engaged in frontal combat, his body straining to maintain control through the pain already clawing at his nerves.
The giant stone hand reaches forward.
It does not hesitate.
It grabs the platform.
And crushes it.
The healing structure shatters apart instantly.
Stone fractures explode outward in all directions, ancient carvings splitting into fragments as the entire platform collapses under the force. The faint blue light that once pulsed through it bursts free in a sudden flare, scattering into the surrounding water like a dying signal released all at once.
Teufel's unconscious body tumbles free.
The shimmering bubble distorts violently as its structure destabilizes, the boundary flickering before collapsing inward. Water rushes in as the air pocket fails, swallowing him completely as his body drifts weightless for a moment before beginning to sink.
The Drakolimne jerks.
Not recoiling.
Reacting.
Panic.
Actual panic.
Its entire body convulses mid-motion, abandoning the frontal clash without hesitation. Its head snaps toward Teufel, its luminous eyes narrowing sharply as its priorities shift in an instant.
It surges.
The water around it detonates outward as it redirects, currents breaking formation as it forces its way across the battlefield with sudden, overwhelming urgency.
Meanwhile—
The rogue golem reaches Teufel first.
Its movements are no longer steady.
They are aggressive. Jagged.
Its stone fingers clamp down around Teufel's armor.
Then—
Rip.
The sound is muted by water, but the effect is unmistakable. Metal tears apart in warped, twisted strips, the enchanted plating folding under pressure it was never meant to endure. The armor crumples like thin tin, breaking away piece by piece as the golem's grip tightens.
Fragments drift away into the surrounding currents.
Then the golem's other hand closes around Teufel's sword.
For a moment—
Stillness.
Then—
It snaps.
The blade fractures into three pieces with a dull, heavy crack that echoes through the water like a distant impact. The broken sections drift apart, spinning slowly as they sink.
The Drakolimne closes the distance.
Its jaws open—
And it unleashes a violent current blast.
The water surges forward in a concentrated eruption, slamming into the rogue construct with enough force to tear it backward. The lake floor beneath them erupts as the pressure digs into the sediment, throwing up massive clouds of mud that engulf the entire area in thick, blinding darkness.
Visibility vanishes.
Everything becomes movement and force.
The Drakolimne doesn't slow.
It crashes bodily into the damaged thirty-meter golem next.
There is no finesse.
Only impact.
Its newly regenerated scales slice forward like blades, grinding directly through the weakened stone structure. The contact point explodes outward, fractures ripping across the golem's torso as entire sections of its body collapse inward.
The giant breaks apart.
Chunks of stone shear off and tumble downward, slamming into the lakebed in heavy, crushing impacts. Limbs detach. The torso caves. The construct disintegrates into a collapsing mass of rubble.
Above—
Hano convulses.
His body jerks violently as the destruction feeds directly back through the connection. Pain floods his system in a surge that forces a ragged, broken gasp from his throat. Blood trickles from his nose, thin at first, then heavier, streaking down across his lips.
Onaga tightens his grip, pulling him upright before he can collapse completely.
"Disconnect! Disconnect now!"
But Hano barely hears.
His focus is fractured, dragged between control and overload, his mind struggling to hold onto too many points at once.
Below—
The corrupted third golem moves again.
Slow at first.
Then with growing intent.
It crawls toward the remains of the destroyed middle construct, its massive limbs dragging across the lakebed, pushing through clouds of sediment and broken stone.
Then—
It begins absorbing it.
The process is wrong.
There is no clean integration.
Stone folds inward unnaturally, fragments lifting from the debris and pulling themselves toward the rogue construct as if drawn by an unseen force. Pieces twist as they move, rotating mid-water before slamming into place along its body.
Rebuilds.
Reshapes.
The mass grows.
Expands.
But not into a humanoid form.
It compresses.
Narrows.
Elongates.
The structure warps into something entirely different.
A gigantic cone.
A drill.
Thirty-eight meters of spinning stone and shattered debris, layered into a spiraling mass that tightens toward a single, brutal point. The outer surface grinds continuously, fragments locking into rotation as the entire construct begins to turn.
Slowly at first.
Then faster.
Comtois stares at the lake surface as it begins to distort again.
"Okay now that is metal as hell."
Ryong nods absentmindedly, pen still moving across soaked pages.
"Psychological degradation from cursed artifact potentially causing unstable tactical creativity..."
"YOU SAY EVERYTHING LIKE A DOCUMENTARY."
The drill spins.
Faster.
Faster.
The surrounding water responds immediately. Currents begin to twist around the rotating mass, pulled into its motion. The lake starts to fold inward, surface tension warping as a whirlpool begins to form above the construct.
The rotation intensifies.
The lake itself seems to spiral.
Then—
It launches.
The entire mass surges forward in a straight line toward the Drakolimne, acceleration building almost instantly. The spinning stone tears through the water, carving a trench across the lakebed as it goes. Sediment erupts behind it in a massive plume, dragged into its wake.
The Drakolimne reacts.
It roars—
And tries to evade.
Its body twists sharply, coils shifting as it attempts to redirect its mass away from the incoming strike. Currents explode outward as it forces movement through the water.
Too late.
Impact.
The collision detonates beneath the lake.
The force compresses everything at the point of contact—water, stone, motion—into a single, violent release. For a fraction of a second, the entire lake surface above distorts upward, swelling unnaturally as if something massive is pushing from below.
The bulge rises.
Holds.
Then collapses.
Water crashes downward again in a violent cascade, the surface shattering into waves that race outward in all directions.
The shockwave follows.
It travels through the lake, through the shoreline, through the ground itself.
Trees bend violently backward as the force hits, trunks flexing under pressure. Loose rocks lift and skip across the ground, bouncing in uneven arcs before settling again. The air trembles with the residual impact.
Birds explode into the night sky, their cries sharp and panicked as they flee the disturbance.
Even Mount Morito echoes faintly in the distance.
A low, delayed rumble.
As if the land itself felt it.
The depths of the Drakolimne's domain transformed into a suffocating, pressurized theater of carnage as the initial detonation rippled through the freezing currents. The shockwave did not merely hit the creature; it unmade it, as the legendary, iridescent scales that had withstood centuries of pressure began to buckle and rupture with the sickening sound of grinding tectonic plates.
Beneath the primary blast, the true cruelty of the assault revealed itself as fragments of magically charged stone, which had been driven deep into the beast's exposed muscle, began to glow with a volatile, internal light. These embedded shards acted like delayed-action mines, detonating individually within the open wounds to tear apart connective tissue and shatter the underlying skeletal structure.
A thick, viscous torrent of yellow blood erupted from the punctures, blooming outward in massive, swirling clouds that choked the visibility of the abyss and turned the water into a murky, sulfuric fog.
The Drakolimne, a titan of the depths, began to convulse in a rhythmic, agonizing display of muscular failure, its massive tail lashing out with enough force to create localized cavitations that shattered nearby rock formations. Y
et, even as its nervous system fired in a frantic symphony of pain and its life force hemorrhaged into the lake, a singular, focused intent remained within its dying consciousness. Through the haze of golden ichor and falling debris, the creature extended its dying will to manifest a shimmering, translucent bubble around Teufel, encasing him in a pocket of preserved air and stillness. It was a final, desperate act of guardianship, an expenditure of its last embers of vitality to ensure his safety even as its own body drifted toward the threshold of total collapse.
On the shoreline, the visceral toll of the underwater catastrophe manifested with brutal clarity as Hano's body buckled under the weight of the feedback. He did not merely fall; he collapsed completely, his knees striking the jagged rocks as the mental tether that bound him to the lake's depths snapped with the finality of a guillotine. With the connection broken, the unnatural life that had animated the heavy stone sentinels vanished in an instant, and all remaining golems suspended their movements mid-stride, their glowing runes fading into cold grey. T
he structural integrity of the constructs failed as the magic evaporated, causing the massive forms to crumble apart beneath the churning surface of the lake, returning to the silt and mud from which they had been birthed. Beside Hano, the two floating stone shields that had hovered with such defiant weight simply dissolved, their solid mass cascading downward in a dry, rustling stream of ordinary sand that the wind immediately began to scatter across the shore.
Ryong, seemingly unaffected by the surrounding chaos, did not offer a hand to help, but instead watched the disintegration with a clinical, predatory focus as he scribbled notes into a small, leather-bound journal.
"External manifestations destabilized after neurological disconnect..." he muttered, his voice a flat drone against the sound of the crashing waves and Hano's ragged breathing.
Nearby, Onaga stepped forward with a heavy, purposeful gait and reached down to forcibly pry the Morito Sword from Hano's shaking, white-knuckled hand.
The weapon resisted for a moment, held fast by a dying reflex, but Onaga's strength was absolute, and he wrenched the blade free as he looked down at the fallen warrior. The cost of the battle was written in ink across Hano's skin, as dark, necrotic veins had begun to spread visibly across the side of his neck, branching out like obsidian lightning toward his jawline.
Hano offered no resistance, his chest heaving as he breathed hard through clenched teeth, each inhalation a rattling struggle against the exhaustion threatening to pull him into unconsciousness.
The silence of the aftermath was broken by Comtois, who walked over with a scowl of mounting impatience, his boots crunching loudly over the debris and sand. He reached down and began dragging the heavy, fallen stone shields aside with a grunt of physical effort, tossing the useless fragments of rock as if they were nothing more than clutter.
"What was the point of these giant rock frisbees anyway?!" Comtois barked, his voice echoing off the surrounding cliffs as he kicked a particularly large piece of rubble into the shallows.
Hano winced from his position on the ground, his eyes half-closed as he struggled to find his voice through the haze of the feedback. "Defense..." he managed to wheeze out, the word barely a whisper.
Comtois stopped his movement and looked down at Hano with a mix of disbelief and annoyance. "Defense? Bro they defended NOTHING."
"One literally blocked an ice beam..." Hano countered, his voice trembling but carrying a faint, stubborn edge of pride.
"And then exploded!" Comtois snapped back, throwing his hands up in a gesture of exasperated futility.
Hano's head sank slightly lower against the dirt, but he didn't yield the point. "That still counts!"
With a final, dismissive snort, Comtois dropped a broken stone slab loudly against the shoreline, the impact sending a spray of gravel into the air. Behind them, the surface of the lake remained a scene of violent unrest, the water churning and frothing as the currents refused to settle. Beneath that roiling surface, the wounded Drakolimne continued to defy the laws of biology and magic alike; it was still living, still moving through its own blood, and still anchored by a singular, unbreakable purpose.
Even as its heart slowed and its scales drifted to the lakebed like falling leaves, it remained a hulking silhouette of protective shadow, shielding Teufel from the crushing weight of the world above.