“Cough, cough…” Rubble clawed open, and dust drifted like a gray storm; Hazel’s cough rasped through the smoky hollow.

Fear hit first, a cold tide. Her body hadn’t caught up with the sudden upheaval, but the truth already bit—her hand and Skela’s had been torn apart.

“Sanyi! Where are you?!”

It was her own voice, yet it stabbed her ears like needles. The sonic boom and sealed echoes rolled like thunder in a cave, and every sound collapsed into skull-buzz.

No—there was the dull swell of a concussion. Hazel knew it on reflex. She didn’t stop to heal; she dropped to her knees and clawed at the stones where Skela had just been.

(Leave…)

Something whispered from the dark like wind through reeds, but panic churned her mind to foam. Her fingers split on stone and iron shards, unaware; she kept prying up slabs—until a blood-rope cinched her waist and yanked her away like a hooked fish.

An instant later, a massive column of flesh stamped flat the spot she’d been in.

She hung midair, stunned, watching that stomp rip the ground like a mudslide, then drifted through a pitch-black barrier. The blood-rope set her down beside Adelaide like a careful net.

“Don’t worry. Your little pup’s fine.”

So close, even through the swarm of buzz, Hazel finally caught Adelaide’s voice like a bell through fog. She followed Adelaide’s finger and saw Skela slumped against the wall, eyes unfocused, the look of someone torn awake.

“Sanyi!”

Skela didn’t turn at the shout. She wasn’t ignoring her; the world simply didn’t reach.

When Hazel reached her, Skela finally noticed and offered a thin, I’m-okay smile, brittle as frost.

But she wasn’t okay. Blood glinted on her small earlobe like a red bead; the sonic boom had hit her harder. Heart aching, Hazel knelt and pressed a healing sigil to the neck beneath that ear, cool light blooming like moonwater.

The diagnosis surfaced in a blink: ruptured eardrum. Hazel healed it at once—future hearing shouldn’t suffer—but for now, silence would shroud Skela like snow.

“I’m fine, Hazel… it’s okay, don’t make that face…”

“Don’t open your mouth. It’ll tug the ear canal and hurt.”

Hazel raised a hush finger; Skela obeyed, lips closing like a petal. And yes—compared to being crushed dead by flying debris, luck had brushed them with its sleeve.

Hazel checked her quickly, hands fluttering like sparrows. Only this new wound. Her breath finally eased, a tide going out.

Only then did she reach back for what just happened. The earth’s shiver had sharpened into a quake. Circles of sigils flared around Adelaide like crimson lanterns. A blood-wall wrapped Hazel and Skela, and then the blast—her memory cut clean there, like a snapped string.

Now she looked around. A thin mist of pitch-black matter ringed their little refuge, like night condensed.

She knew it—Rilman’s Confinement Cell, the notorious original spell from their middle school dean. True to its name, a black barrier made a detention cell. Information flowed one way: outside saw a vague shadow, while inside could watch and listen to the world like a window on rain.

When she first heard it, Hazel had thought the logic upside down. Genius, as it turned out—cruel, precise genius.

The chosen unlucky kid would be locked in the dead center of the playground, forced to watch friends laughing an arm’s length away, unable to cross that thin night. Abandoned loneliness bit deeper than any normal detention; rule-breaking plummeted like a cliff. Rilman sold scrolls to nearby schools and minted coin, and students in the capital Balad crowned him “the Bald Demon.”

That demonic design saved them now. They hid beneath a seven- or eight-meter slab of shattered iron gate. Thanks to the one-way veil of Rilman’s Confinement Cell, they could steal a breath—and glimpse the hand behind this chaos.

Though for a normal soul, seeing that thing was no blessing.

Hazel stared at the “person” across the chamber, throat dry. She swallowed like someone tasting iron.

“What… is that?”

Two hands, two feet, a head on top—the shape read human. It wasn’t. It stood dozens of meters tall, its crown nearly scraping the ceiling, a small mountain planted in a room.

For all that bulk, its limbs weren’t meat-hills; they were lean in a sick, overbuilt way. Even from a distance you saw half-sphere muscles ripple under mummified bronze skin, and dense arrays of spell-lines lurked beneath like hunting veins.

“—Ghoul Warden Golem.”

Adelaide answered, eyes never leaving the monster’s head, steady as a hunter’s sight.

Its skin lay bare everywhere except the head, which wore a half-meter-thick cast-iron helm, seamless as a sealed tomb. Only an opening at the neck let its breath leak—each exhale a peal of thunder, echoing over and over in the underground like storm on stone.

“The royal lot are generous. This thing chews through at least ten thousand corpses to make.”

Adelaide’s voice held a razor of mockery. Hazel turned, disbelief bright as lightning.

“…How do you know?”

Adelaide didn’t answer, because the golem’s head twisted a full one-eighty, with a crack like a spine breaking a branch.

No visor marked its gaze, but she knew—it had them pegged like stars on a map.

“Run left.”

She dropped the line like a pebble, then ripped away the veil. Hundreds of magic missiles loosed as the black fog vanished, and tangled trails laced the air, weaving a tight net toward the golem like a web on fire.

But the golem moved with a grace that mocked its mass. It charged and slipped, limbs bending in ways no natural thing could. It threaded the missile snare, then drove a fist into the spot Rilman’s Confinement Cell had held like a hammer on earth.

Boom.

Another blast, and compared to that quake-punch, every other sound shrank to dust.

Inside the thunder, Adelaide’s sharp chant cut clean.

“yal—(Recall)”

At the call, every missile flipped in the same instant. Freeze the moment, and you’d see staggered trails forming a half-dome in the air, all arrows pointing at the golem’s heart.

Only then did the caster’s aim show—she’d aimed at herself from the start, and the golem, locked by the momentum of that punch, couldn’t slip the point-blank, no-angle barrage.

Ten seconds of thick explosions rolled like boiling tar. Every missile slammed home. Each blast bloomed into searing sheets of bloodfire, burning in air, smothering the colossus like a crimson storm.

Hazel had already broken left. She glanced back, recoiling at the fury, then hope flared like a spark catching tinder.

“Did we take it down?!”

Adelaide, standing on a high slab to the right, clicked her tongue, dry as flint.

The next second, the golem rose out of the barrage. Not a scorch mark marred it. The bloodfire hadn’t ever touched flesh, stopped by an invisible shield like glass over a flame.

“What the hell is this thing?!”