The battle felt like it had lasted for hours.
We'd carved our way through waves of shrieking bodies until only the Shaman, three hobgoblins, and a sea of lesser goblins remained. The floor was unrecognizable, slick with blood, scattered with shell casings and broken weapons. The air reeked of copper, smoke, and something worse. Every breath scraped like sandpaper.
The Shaman hadn't slowed. His chants clawed through the air, feeding power into the glowing altar behind him. Every word made the goblins twitch, froth, and lunge harder.
He was drawing from them, using their rage, their deaths, to keep himself alive.
We were barely standing.
Nicole had run out of ammunition and was using a knife now, striking with clinical precision. Sloan and Giselle fought closest to the altar now. Sloan was swinging a scavenged axe in wide, brutal arcs while Giselle covered him with precise bursts from her rifle. Every shot echoed, cutting through the Shaman's chanting. Sloan's arms shook from fatigue, his swings slower, while Giselle's aim wavered as the recoil bit into her shoulder, but neither backed off. They'd stopped fighting for victory. Now it was just to make sure the rest of us could breathe. Lian stayed near me, face streaked with blood that wasn't all hers. Mitch was silent, mechanical, firing bursts into anything that moved.
Even Marcus, who hadn't said much the whole fight, lifted his blade and forced a grin. "The end's near," he rasped. "He's running out of bodies."
I wished I could believe him.
But the truth was written across every face still standing, what was left of us.
Only a handful of us still fought: Nicole, Viktor, Laney, Sol, and the rest, all bloodied, half-broken, but standing. Burned, bloodied, and running on fumes, but alive.
The rest had already been forced back. Liz, Mitch, Devan, Kyle, and Jordan were barely conscious, physically or mentally spent, and Wei Shen had taken them, along with the rescued women, back to base. Marcus's people were gone, every one of them cut down to buy us time. Nadia's team was also wiped out before we even reached the altar.
Now it was just us, the last fragments of two broken squads, held together by stubbornness, grief, and blood.
Nicole moved with grim precision, her knife flashing under the altar's glow as she barked orders between strikes. Sloan and Giselle fought the left flank, perfectly in sync despite their exhaustion, one cutting through the front ranks while the other covered openings with bursts of gunfire. Laney, Briar, and Logan anchored the rear, turning anything that slipped through into corpses before it reached us. Viktor, bleeding from his side, stayed shoulder to shoulder with Nicole, his sword dragging slightly but still finding its mark every time. Marcus anchored the center, shield trembling but never dropping, covering anyone who stumbled. And Lian, her face streaked with dirt and blood, stayed close to me, eyes hardened, her fear gone, her movements sharper than ever.
And then there was Sol. Kneeling behind a fallen pillar, bowstring drawn, his small frame steady in the chaos. His quiver was almost empty, but every arrow he loosed found its mark. The faint hum of mana shimmered around the bow with each shot, a pulse of pale light that cut through the smoke. His face was streaked with grime, his eyes focused, older than they should've ever looked. I wanted to tell him to stop, to hide, to stay behind me, but I knew he wouldn't listen. He was my child, through and through: quiet, relentless, and far too comfortable aiming death at monsters twice his size.
We were a patchwork of the barely living, held together by willpower, rage, and the faint hope that maybe this nightmare could still end. Every one of us was bleeding. Every one of us was breaking.
My lungs burned. My arms felt like lead. Every heartbeat hit heavier, slower, like my body was trying to stop before my mind would let it.
If this was the end, it didn't feel like victory waiting on the other side. It felt like the world was holding its breath, waiting to see which of us would fall first.
The altar's glow flared again, flooding the court in green light. The Shaman shrieked, raising his staff high as the last three hobgoblins stepped forward to protect him.
They were larger and more intelligent, moving with the precision of trained soldiers. Their armor was jagged scrap metal fused with bone, and each carried a weapon too large for any human to wield.
The first hobgoblin lunged at Nicole, its jagged cleaver glinting under the altar's sick light. She sidestepped the blow by inches, boots sliding across the blood-slick tile, and slashed low, her knife carving clean through its hamstring. The creature howled, stumbling forward, and she didn't waste the opening. Nicole drove her blade up under its jaw, twisting until the scream stopped. It collapsed at her feet, twitching once before going still.
The second one came crashing through the bodies, twice her size, armor fused with shards of bone and broken glass. It swung a slab of metal shaped into an axe, the force of the strike sending a shockwave through the air. Devan moved to intercept, but the blow hit him square in the chest, launching him across the floor. He slammed into a shattered wall display with a sickening crunch and slid down, his weapon clattering beside him.
"Devan!" I shouted, already moving.
The hobgoblin turned toward him, snarling, its teeth jagged and wet. My feet hit the ground hard as I closed the distance, but my fists were all I had. I ducked under its swing and drove my knuckles into its ribs. The impact barely made it flinch. My second strike landed higher, its neck, nothing. The creature just growled, eyes glinting like wet coals. My hands throbbed from the contact; its hide was like stone.
My fists weren't going to cut it.
I looked around, scanning the ground, searching for anything that could kill this thing before it crushed Devan. That's when I saw it, a broken femur, long and splintered, half buried beneath a pile of corpses. It looked like it had belonged to one of the hobgoblins' own, gnawed clean and discarded.
I didn't hesitate. I grabbed it. The femur was slick with blood, cold and heavy like it remembered the life it once held.
The creature swung again, a rusted blade that whistled through the air. I ducked under it and drove the femur across its face with every ounce of strength I had. The impact cracked against bone, splitting skin. It stumbled back with a hoarse growl, clutching its cheek, and I followed up, another swing, then another, each blow duller, heavier, until the bone itself began to fracture in my grip.
It went down to one knee, snarling, blood bubbling from its mouth. I didn't stop. I raised the femur high and slammed the jagged end straight into its throat. The sound was sharp and wet, and the hobgoblin convulsed once before collapsing.
I stood over it, chest heaving, the femur still in my hand, now cracked down the middle.
"Guess you'll do," I muttered, before turning toward Devan.
He was breathing, barely, but alive.