As the sand‑woman watched the seconds slip away, powerless to intervene, she could only witness the energy surging violently within Diego's hands, a force amplified by his relentless speed and crushing momentum. When his strike collided with her hastily raised guard, her fragile hands shattered in an instant, bones splintering like brittle glass. Though her defense failed to halt the devastating punch, it bought her a fleeting heartbeat of time—just enough for one last desperate attempt at escape.
The moment Diego's fist came into view, the sand‑woman cleared her mind, stripping away futile thoughts of victory. Her stubborn resolve had carried her this far, but now survival alone consumed her. Escape was nearly impossible—her army gone, her constructs destroyed, leaving only herself, and she doubted her own strength would suffice. Still, she raised her hands to shield her face, mimicking the way her rock golems once stalled Diego's advance. She knew they would not stop him, but perhaps they could slow the momentum gathered within Diego's hands and therefore reduce the velocity of his strike, which would hopefully grant her a sliver of opportunity to escape. And it worked.
Even as her hands were crushed, she reached deep within, commanding the crystal pendant at her neck. It flared suddenly, bursting with arcane light, granting her the power to teleport from the trap she had unwittingly created. With one final glance at Diego's figure, his fury closing in, her ruined hands trembling with cracks and broken bones, she vanished in a wave of shimmering purple radiance—escaping only moments before his punch would have obliterated her skull.
With the sand‑woman finally out of the way, Diego was now able to proceed out of the inner courtyard toward the passage leading to the throne room, and possibly enter the throne room itself. With a slight shake of his garments—half wary not to track dust and mud into the passage hall, and also wanting to appear clean and less disheveled when approaching Maru—Diego shook the little amount of dirt clogging his body and moved a tile while drifting forward, preparing for the next obstacle blocking his way to Maru's throne.
However, while drifting, Diego began to wonder if Maru was truly in the castle. Although he thrived under chaos and seemed to welcome danger, Diego was a strategist, which meant that when stepping into peril, although it appeared he never planned or blocked the threats approaching him, he always found a way to manipulate the chaos itself, bending it into a weapon to move forward unscathed and without fear. This meant that while Diego seemed never to plan for danger directly, he always paid attention to subtle signs, tailoring his approach so he would either remain unharmed or twist the chaos to his advantage. As he studied the faint codes he had unconsciously collected while storming Maru's castle, he began connecting them, forced to confront a troubling possibility: "What if Mary wasn't here?"
The thought was simple: anyone could discern the codes that shimmered almost as bright as stars, tracing their patterns like connecting dots in a celestial drawing. At first, when Diego approached the inner courtyard, Maru's officials, lackeys, and security systems seemed unusually active, almost as if preparing for an attack. Of course, Diego dismantled the traps, thrusters, bombs, and lasers aimed at him with relative ease, but the sheer coordination was strange and mysterious, not something one would expect in Maru's castle. Then came the latest combatant Diego fought—the sand‑woman. She was formidable, forcing Diego to draw upon a few of his abilities to defeat her instead of him just taking her down with relative ease as he had taken down the security system. Though he dispatched her easily and granted her the chance to flee, she would have been a deadly nightmare to any other advanced soul being, from skeleton knights to apprentice soul vampires. To Diego, she seemed weak, but her strategy, her army, and her fiery temper gave her strength enough to turn the tide of battle.
Even from her attacks, it was clear she was no ordinary skeleton lich but a strategist in her own right, with mastery of her power. She had even escaped from someone as powerful as Diego—a feat remarkable in itself. Though Diego let her go, it was still astonishing, proof that she was by no means weak, and perhaps a sign that Maru's influence lingered even in her defiance.
Just imagine each one of her attacks was meticulously designed to cripple the opponent, ranging from the first sand golem she summoned—in which an ordinary attacker might have mistaken for the main and final boss of the courtyard—to the thousands of little rock golems that were like living rocks hurled towards an opponent, engineered to slow down, overwhelm, and exhaust the power within an ordinary opponent. The sheer destructive force of their stampede could crash into any advanced soul being and crush the bones and joints holding them together, reducing even hardened warriors to fragments, just as a well‑aimed bowling ball clears the pins with merciless precision. And even if a soul being managed to evade all these relentless attacks, they still had to fight the rock golems one on one, which was the true nightmare, because the rock golems also carried runic sorcery within them.
They weren't just mindless minions; instead, they were intelligent constructs capable of manipulating cursed energy in the atmosphere to either amplify their strength or add crushing weight to their bodies which could in turn destabilize the opponent's energy entirely.
The rock golems would undoubtedly be a nightmare to any normal soul being, whether they were a skeleton knight, skeleton lich, or even an apprentice soul vampire, because the sheer number of golems attacking at once, combined with their range of abilities, coordination, and relentless persistence, was far more formidable than fighting a soul being of the same rank.