The snarl was a physical force, a deep, grinding sound that seemed to vibrate the rocks beneath the Chief Minister's feet. Then, the beast came.
The creature burst from the tree line with impossible speed. Its body was a seven-meter streak of dark, sleek muscle, low to the ground, but rising three meters at the shoulder, giving it the terrifying, predatory profile of a massive feline. Its red, slitted eyes were locked on Cao Cao, the biggest obstacle. With every colossal bound, the ground where its paws landed glowed, leaving scorched earth and kicking up embers. The air immediately grew thick with the smell of ozone and burning pine.
The sheer pressure of the creature's charge was palpable. It wasn't just momentum; it was the raw, unrestrained energy of Pangea made flesh. The trio of humans, equipped only with two crude stone axes and a single ancestral sword, looked impossibly small and frail.
Cao Cao roared, his voice overcoming the monster's guttural breathing. He took a single, defiant step forward, bracing himself. He knew a direct block would shatter his arm and his sword. His strategy wasn't to stop the force, but to deflect it.
The Hellcat lowered its massive, horned skull, aiming the single black spiral horn on its forehead like a battering ram.
Cao Cao waited until the final moment, the terrifying sight of the flaming feet about to impact the earth where he stood. He didn't meet the blow head-on. Instead, he dropped his stance, angling his ancestral sword parallel to the beast's body. Just as the horn met his defense, he shoved the blade with a burst of strength, driving the point against the hard cartilage ridge above the Hellcat's nose and leveraging his full body weight to slide the force away.
The impact still felt like a thunderclap traveling up his arm, forcing a grunt of pain from his throat and scraping the steel. The Hellcat was momentarily thrown off balance, its charge veering sharply to Cao Cao's right, exactly where Sirius stood.
"Earth! Now!" Cao Cao barked, already scrambling backward to reset his position.
Sirius, whose mind was screaming for him to run, found his body moving solely on the Legionnaire's discipline. He saw the colossal flank of the beast hurtle past Cao Cao. The Hellcat was trying to pivot back, its flaming feet ripping deep gashes in the earth.
"It's counter-attacking!" Sirius yelled, fear spiking in his voice. His role as Earth was to prevent this counter-attack and protect Cao Cao. He didn't have a shield. He had only the stone ax.
"Low! Aim for the joints! Not the body!" Cao Cao screamed the correction as he recovered.
Sirius swung his stone ax not at the fur, but at the Hellcat's back leg, aiming for the knee joint, a place he knew would be crucial for a siege machine's stability. The stone blade scraped against the creature's thick hide and muscle, barely sinking in an inch, but it was enough. The unexpected distraction, combined with the loss of momentum from Cao Cao's deflection, forced the beast to pause its pivot, its attention snapping to the lesser threat.
"Heaven! It's locked on the Roman! Strike!"
Dixon had been trembling, but unlike Sirius's fear, his was the trembling of a coiled snake. Seeing the terrifying creature momentarily focused on Sirius, Dixon let out a fierce, guttural battle cry—a sound older than the Akkadian Empire itself.
He didn't swing; he dove. Using the momentum of his powerful legs, he launched himself toward the Hellcat's massive head, aiming for the tender area just behind the ear and below the spiraling horn—a fatal weakness he knew from his years of skinning animals for the empire.
"Die, beast!" Dixon yelled, driving the stone ax with all the primal rage of a man fighting for his last breath.
CRUNCH.
The ax hit its mark. But instead of splitting the skull, the stone blade chipped loudly against dense, cartilage-reinforced bone, creating only a shallow, bloody wound. The force of the strike was enough, however, to send the Hellcat staggering sideways, its slitted eyes flashing in shock and pain.
"It barely felt it! Our weapons are useless!" Sirius screamed, his voice strained.
"They are not useless!" Cao Cao corrected immediately, his tone sharp. "They are tools of maneuver, not destruction! Dixon, get back! Sirius, move! Do not hold the line! Retreat to the wall!"
The Hellcat, injured and enraged, let out a massive roar that echoed off the mountain, momentarily stunning Lia and Old Lao. It spun, its blazing red feet leaving scorch marks where the trio had stood.
The creature was faster now, moving with vengeful precision. Cao Cao knew they couldn't survive another charge in open ground.
"Back against the mountain!" Cao Cao yelled, pointing to a tight gap between two boulders nestled against the basin wall. "Sirius, Earth, run! Dixon, you cover our retreat!"
As Sirius scrambled backward, the Hellcat lunged with a massive, snapping jaw. Dixon, fueled by adrenaline, roared and swung his ax into the creature's massive snout. The blow deflected the head for a second, buying Sirius the critical distance he needed.
"The space is too tight for its body! We limit its charge!" Cao Cao instructed, pointing toward the tight gap. "Sirius, you have the stone axe! Use your engineering! Find the flaw in the terrain!"
Sirius, breathing heavily, stared at the massive rock face. His mind, trained to calculate structural integrity for siege engines, instantly saw the advantage. "The gap! We narrow the front! It can't use its width!"
Cao Cao was the first to reach the chokepoint, turning immediately. He now used the ancestral sword not as a weapon, but as a line of defense, holding the blade across the gap.
The Hellcat, frustrated by the lack of clear targets, lunged into the gap. Its massive shoulders were forced to squeeze, slowing its movement. Its horn, which had been its primary weapon, was now uselessly jammed against the rock above Cao Cao.
"Now, Earth!" Cao Cao grunted, his arms shaking from the pressure of simply maintaining the block.
Sirius, his fear now replaced by an engineer's focus, saw his target. The Hellcat's left foreleg was pressed against a loose, softball-sized rock near the base of the wall. He slammed the stone ax down, not aiming to cut the leg, but to drive the rock into the muscle between the ground and the paw.
THWACK!
The maneuver worked. The sudden, agonizing pressure on its leg forced the Hellcat to rear back, its front paws clawing uselessly at the rock face to dislodge the pain.
"Heaven! It's exposed!" Cao Cao yelled, his chance finally here.
Dixon, who had been panting but ready, saw the massive animal thrash. He didn't aim for the head or the body this time. He aimed for the flaming feet.
"If we can't pierce the armor, we kill the fire!" Dixon shouted.
He darted forward and slammed his ax repeatedly into the glowing red paw closest to him, the force of his blows aiming to crush the bone beneath the flaming skin, disrupting the creature's unnatural energy source.
The stone axe didn't crush the paw, but the cumulative trauma from the blows against the sensitive, burning flesh was too much. The Hellcat shrieked, an ear-splitting sound of pain and rage. The fire around its paw guttered, then vanished.
The loss of the flaming propulsion threw the creature's balance completely off. The massive Hellcat staggered, tripping over its own uneven gait, and crashed heavily to the ground, kicking up a cloud of dust and debris.
"It's crippled!" Cao Cao shouted, moving around the downed beast with lethal speed. "Sirius, hold the head! Dixon, finish the limb!"
Sirius, finding courage in the creature's collapse, grabbed a sharp rock and jammed it into the Hellcat's exposed shoulder joint, pinning it. Dixon, with a final, desperate surge of ancient tribal savagery, raised his ax and brought it down hard, severing the sinews of the crippled, now dark-skinned leg.
The Hellcat let out a final, piteous wail, its life force draining out of the ruined limb. Cao Cao, wasting no time, drove his ancestral sword deep into the base of its skull.
The massive body went instantly limp. The fight was over.
Silence returned to the basin, broken only by the ragged, painful breathing of the three exhausted fighters. Cao Cao leaned on his sword, Sirius dropped his ax and sagged against the rock, and Dixon stood, covered in the creature's thick, purple-black blood, his primal grin slowly fading back into grim exhaustion.
Lia and Old Lao rushed forward. Lia immediately began inspecting the three for injuries, her face pale but determined.
"Lord Cao Cao, you're bleeding!" Lia cried, seeing a deep gash on his forearm from the initial deflection.
"It is nothing," Cao Cao gasped, looking at the immense carcass of the Hellcat. He looked at Sirius and Dixon, who had not broken formation. "We survived. The Village Era has begun."