The afterimage of the blast still burned behind Rhuvia's eyelids when she forced herself upright.
She rubbed her eyes hard with the heel of one hand, blinking away the dancing violet spots that refused to fade.
The clearing reeked of scorched ozone and hot blood. The circle still glowed, though weaker than before. Its runes flickered like a dying heart. Small shapes continued to form and spill outward in a rapid stream, dog-sized dinosaur-creatures solidifying one after another, scales still glistening with residual energy, and immediately scrambling for the trees.
"What are you standing around for?!"
Rhuvia's voice cracked across the space, raw and furious, cutting through the ringing that still filled every ear present in the scene.
"Kill every last one that comes out of that circle! At this rate, the entire wave will head straight for the village!"
The command with warning attached snapped the others out of stunned silence like a physical blow.
Weapons came up on each hand at once.
Maya planted herself between the circle and the trampled path the first surge had taken. Her spear moved with brutal, exhausted efficiency: thrust, twist, yank free, thrust again.
Every impact sent a jolt up her arms into the half-healed wound in her leg, but she did not slow. One creature lunged low; she stamped its skull into the dirt with a wet crunch and kept moving. Another tried to slip past her right side; the spearpoint found the soft joint under its jaw and punched upward until the tip exited the top of its head in a spray of dark fluid.
Drosha on the other side fought like a living battering ram. The heavy spear became a blur of wide, punishing arcs that shattered spines and caved in skulls. When a cluster of three tried to overwhelm her, she simply stepped into them, using her bulk and raw strength to knock two aside while the third met the point of her weapon mid-leap. Dark blood sprayed across her arms and chest.
She barely seemed to notice when a fourth creature clamped onto her forearm; she just slammed it again and again, against a tree trunk until the body went limp and discarded it without looking.
Vessa's longsword, still at full enchanted length, moved in to produce wide, beautiful sliced cuts on the creatures that looked almost gentle compared to the others.
Each slice of her ended a life before the creatures could fully clear the edge of the runes. She wasted no motion, no breath. When two came at her together, she pivoted between them, the blade whispering once across a throat and once across a belly.
Both bodies dropped before they could complete their charge. And when a third tried to leap onto her back, she dropped to one knee, reversed the sword in a dramatic way, and drove the point up through its lower jaw without ever fully turning.
While the others fought, Rhuvia's eyes locked on the circle.
She knew she could not pour mana into it. That risk had already been made clear in the ugliest possible way. Detonation or absorption, either outcome would be catastrophic. She needed another way.
Then her gaze snapped to the massive headless corpse they had rolled aside only minutes earlier. The creature had been sitting on the circle, feeding without fear, almost as if it belonged there.
'A guardian?' Suddenly this word came to her mind for some reason.
She had read before that some active circles of this size used to have one. And guardians almost always carried the core that powered the formation.
"Vessa!" Rhuvia shouted over the noise of the fighting, finally realising it. "The big one, its core! The mana stone is the one which is powering this circle!"
Vessa's eyes flicked to the corpse, then back to the monsters still pouring out. Understanding hit her at once, too. She cut down one more creature with a clean horizontal slash, then barked over her shoulder, "Cover me!"
Rhuvia forced her exhausted body into motion. She dropped beside the heavy carcass, boots sliding in blood, and drove her hands into the thick hide along the chest, searching for the densest concentration of residual mana. The flesh was still hot. Blood soaked her arms to the elbows. The smell was overwhelming.
Around her, the battle still raged on, steel striking scale, the wet crunch of spear points finding bone, the harsh breathing of people who had already given more than they had left.
Other members of the strike team began arriving in ones and twos, drawn by the detonation and the sudden noise of combat.
Reading the location of this fight, they asked no questions when they saw what was going on here. They saw the circle and the monsters and simply joined the killing. The clearing became a chaotic slaughterhouse of thrashing bodies, dark blood, and the sharp cracks of force magic.
But even with all of these people, it was still not enough.
For every three they cut down, five more slipped past on the flanks or simply outran the exhausted fighters. Creatures scrambled over the corpses of their own kind. Some climbed low branches and dropped down behind the line. Others darted between legs and vanished into the undergrowth before a blade could reach them.
The largest part of the first surge was already gone, vanished into the black trees with the speed of a living tide, their hissing chorus fading into the night in the exact direction of Buena village.
Rhuvia's fingers finally closed around something hard and unnaturally smooth deep inside the guardian's chest cavity. Feeling a sense that this might be it, she pulled with everything she had left.
The mana core came free with a wet, tearing sound, a rough, fist-sized crystal still pulsing with faint violet light that painted her blood-slick hands in sickly violet color.
"I Got it!" she gasped.
She raised the core and slammed it against the nearest thick root with everything she had left. The crystal cracked but still held strong.
A second desperate strike was all it took, harder than the first. Only then it shattered completely. The violet light inside the circle flared once in a final, violent burst, then died almost immediately.
At the same moment the runes along the circle flickered hard, stuttered, and collapsed into a faint, dying glow. The stream of new monsters cut off at once. The last few that had already formed were quickly finished by the others.
One final creature tried to flee, but Maya's spear took it through the spine before it reached the trees.
The silence of the forest night returned, once again.
It was a heavy, ringing silence. The clearing looked like the aftermath of a massacre, bodies piled in uneven heaps, the ground churned into mud and blood, the air still thick with the smell of ozone and monster blood.
Rhuvia stayed on her knees, the broken pieces of the core still clutched in her blood-slick hands. When she finally looked up, her face was pale under the dirt and sweat. The anger that had driven her through the fight had burned down into something colder and heavier, something that settled in the chest like a stone.
One of the later arrivals, a guild fighter who had been searching the eastern path, looked from the now-dead circle to her. Her chest still heaved. Sweat and blood mixed on her face.
"What was that?" she asked, voice hoarse. "Was that circle the secondary exit? The one linked to the dungeon?"
Rhuvia stared at the faint, empty runes for a long moment. Then her gaze shifted to the dark corridor of trampled undergrowth where the largest part of the wave had disappeared. The path the monsters had taken was clear even in the dark: broken branches, torn earth, a trail of fading hissing that still seemed to echo in her mind.
"Yes," she said. The word came out flat, almost empty. "That was the exit. Possibly the only one this dungeon has been using to push monsters out while the primary gate stayed closed."
She exhaled, with a hissing sound. "I, we all stopped it… but…I guess we were still too late."
No one spoke, or asked what she meant by that. Just seeing her staring at the way the monster went just earlier was enough to know what she meant by that.
Every pair of eyes turned toward the same stretch of black forest. In the distance, too far to see but close enough to imagine with terrible clarity, the village still waited under the same night sky, walls manned, people exhausted, believing the strike team was out here buying them time.
But what the strike only managed to buy them was more monster, coming at them at full speed. Possibly wanting to destroy everything in its path.