The fight had stopped feeling like a wave and turned into a siege. Somewhere along the way, Dorian lost any useful sense of time. There were no clean breaks between enemies anymore, no moments where the courtyard emptied long enough for anyone to breathe or regroup. Hunger Constructs kept dragging themselves through rubble and bodies, absorbing anything left behind. Stone, armor, flesh. Every student who fell became another piece of the enemy, another layer of muscle, bone, and stolen mass. The last healing potion shattered against the courtyard when someone dropped it with shaking hands. Nobody reacted.
There was nothing left to say. Jenn was still fighting, but even she had changed tactics. Her golden wings no longer held her effortlessly above the battlefield. They flickered now, dimming between short bursts of flight as she dropped repeatedly into close combat and used the halberd to finish damaged Constructs herself. Each landing painted more blood across her armor until the polished gold disappeared beneath streaks of red and black. Healing had become something she rationed instead of something she gave freely. A hand against a wound, a pulse of light, enough to stop someone from dying immediately, then she moved on. Helena was burning herself out beside them.
Dorian could see it in the tremors running through her shoulders and the way shadows snapped around her instead of flowing smoothly. Dark mana clung to her skin after each spell, refusing to withdraw completely as she spread curses across the ground with none of the careful layering she had shown earlier. Precision no longer mattered. She simply made every piece of terrain hostile and hoped it bought another few seconds. Evan and Lena had stopped separating. They fought back-to-back because neither had enough energy remaining to cover every angle alone. Blood soaked through the crude bandages wrapped around Evan's arms, and each punch came slower than the one before it, though the new gauntlets still allowed him to hit hard enough to matter. Lena's fire had become brutally efficient. Small bursts. Everyone was running on whatever remained after everything useful had already been spent.
Dorian was still standing, though calling that an achievement felt generous. Predator's Focus had been active for so long that pressure filled his skull from behind his eyes, making the world feel too sharp and too small at the same time. Everything around him had been reduced to trajectories, structural weaknesses, stress points, and the fraction of a second where one movement became another. He saw where bone had fused incorrectly inside a Construct, where armor failed to integrate with flesh, where one strike could destabilize an entire limb. He also saw the faces. They had been background details at first, distorted mouths and eyes embedded inside the monsters' swollen bodies. Now he recognized some of them. One girl trapped beneath translucent tissue had been crying in this same courtyard two waves earlier. Her eyes were open now, but there was nothing left behind them. The curse in Dorian's arm pulsed constantly.
Gray-black discoloration had spread beyond his shoulder and begun creeping toward his neck. Movement remained unaffected, but the pain never stopped. Predator's Focus made it worse by sharpening every sensation until the curse felt threaded directly through his nerves. He refused to turn the skill off. Instead, he leaned harder into the shadows. At first it happened by accident. A strike that should have missed curved enough to connect. Darkness clung to the Fang after the blade entered flesh and bit deeper than steel alone could have managed. Dorian felt the difference and began trying to reproduce it. He stopped thinking of shadow as an effect surrounding his attacks and started treating it as something with weight, something he could pull, angle, and force into the same opening his dagger created.
When a swollen Hunger Construct charged, Dorian moved sideways instead of meeting it directly. Shadow gathered around his legs as he accelerated at an angle that forced the creature to overcommit. Predator's Focus highlighted a weak seam through its side, and he drove the Fang into it. Darkness followed the blade inside. The Construct screamed. It wasn't the roar of an enraged monster. The sound came out thin and terrible, like something realizing it could still experience pain. Its body collapsed inward and dissolved into the familiar slick residue. Dorian grabbed Evan before exhaustion carried him another step forward and dragged him away from the spreading rot as it began eating into the stone. "Watch the ground," Dorian shouted, his voice nearly gone.
"They leave rot behind." Another Construct lumbered toward them immediately, larger than the last, fused limbs shifting beneath almost translucent flesh. Helena tried to bind it and nearly collapsed when the curse snapped backward through her. Dorian caught her beneath one arm before she hit the ground. "I can still fight," she said through clenched teeth. "I know." He kept her upright. "That's the problem." Jenn dropped from above and landed hard enough to crack the pavement. Her wings flared weakly as the halberd punched through the Construct's head. Golden light erupted through the creature, forcing its body into a brief moment of instability. Dorian took the opening and buried the Fang into the exposed core.
The monster collapsed. Jenn swayed immediately afterward and dropped to one knee before forcing herself upright again. She never looked toward the wounded people she had chosen not to heal. Dorian didn't either.
Predator's Focus finally began to overload. Information crowded his awareness faster than his mind could organize it, every movement demanding attention at once. His vision narrowed while the edges blurred into red. The faces inside the Hunger Constructs seemed clearer now, expressions frozen at the instant of absorption. Beneath everything, Slayer stirred with an increasingly simple answer. Stop thinking. Stop hesitating. Cut until nothing moved. Dorian resisted the impulse because surrendering to it felt too easy. The battle slowed anyway, not because the Hunger Constructs had weakened but because the humans could no longer keep pace. Every movement carried pain. Every choice mattered because nobody had enough energy to correct a mistake afterward.
The courtyard became smaller with every death, filled with residue zones, broken weapons, bodies that couldn't be recovered quickly enough, and monsters growing from whatever remained. Dorian wiped blood from his eyes, tightened his grip on the Fang, and stepped forward again. Stopping wasn't an option. Somewhere beneath the exhaustion, something inside him had already decided that if this was where the line finally broke, he would be the thing standing on it when it happened.
The final Hunger Construct emerged through the smoke like something assembled from everything the wave had taken from them. It towered over the ruined courtyard, its body swollen beyond any recognizable anatomy, layers of fused armor and flesh dragging against shattered stone with every step. Faces shifted across its surface. Mouths opened and closed soundlessly. Eyes tracked the remaining survivors from inside tissue that should never have been capable of holding them. It had fed too well. Dorian felt his body begin failing as he looked at it. Predator's Focus flickered for the first time since activation, information arriving a fraction behind reality. His vision doubled and pain stabbed through his skull while the curse surged hard enough to numb his arm. He staggered and caught himself, already knowing he didn't have another full exchange left. Jenn remained on one knee with the halberd planted against the ground to hold herself upright.
Her wings had dimmed into thin outlines of gold that flickered behind her. Helena leaned against a shattered pillar, taking shallow breaths while shadows pooled beneath her feet without direction. Evan's arms shook violently when he raised his fists again, and Lena stood beside him with nothing more than stubborn embers clinging to her hands. Fifteen survivors remained. That was all. The Hunger Construct reared back as stolen mass shifted through its body, preparing for a final charge. For the first time since the Speed Round began, Dorian felt something cold settle into his chest. Not panic. Acceptance.
The ground split. There was no explosion and no violent eruption. Stone simply cracked outward in a wide arc as something cold forced its way upward from beneath the courtyard. Skeletal hands appeared first, clawing through broken pavement. Rotting arms followed, wrapped in corroded armor. Then entire bodies hauled themselves free. Dozens became hundreds within seconds, undead pouring into the courtyard in numbers that should not have been possible. The Hunger Construct hesitated. That alone shocked Dorian. The undead attacked before anyone could issue a command. They slammed into the massive creature from every direction, climbing over one another as they clawed into fused flesh and dragged themselves higher.
The Construct crushed them by the dozens. Limbs broke beneath its weight. Bodies dissolved in residue. None of it mattered. The dead didn't feel pain, lose morale, or stop when the creature tore them apart. Every destroyed corpse was replaced immediately by another. The Hunger Construct roared while the swarm buried it beneath sheer numbers. Its regeneration began failing because there was too much dead matter attacking at once for the creature to properly absorb. Instead of feeding cleanly, it choked on the flood. Faces embedded across its body twisted as the structure destabilized. Undead hands tore through the outer mass and ripped it open from within. The Construct collapsed under them, and dozens of hungry mouths descended on whatever remained. The courtyard became quiet except for the wet sound of undead tearing apart the final pieces until even those dissolved into hissing residue.
Someone stepped through the swarm. Wilhelm. His clothing was untouched by the battle, his expression almost offensively calm as he surveyed the devastation. The undead parted around him without command. One raised hand stopped every corpse at once. Wilhelm approached the survivors, reached beneath his coat, and removed several vials. Then several more. Health potions. Mana potions. More than Dorian had seen gathered in one place since the Ascension began. Wilhelm distributed them without explanation. Survivors reached out with trembling hands and drank immediately. Relief hit some of them hard enough that they collapsed. Someone started sobbing. Another laughed with the brittle edge of hysteria.
One survivor grabbed Wilhelm's sleeve while thanking him before realizing what he had done and quickly letting go. Others whispered his name with the kind of gratitude usually reserved for prayers. Dorian accepted a potion and emptied it. Warmth spread through his body just enough to push back the edge of collapse. He nodded toward Wilhelm. "Thanks." The word came easily. The thought behind it did not. Where the fuck have you been? Anger burned hotter than the curse for a moment. Wilhelm had arrived when the battle became unwinnable. Not before the potions disappeared. Not while Helena was burning herself hollow, Jenn was choosing who could be saved, or survivors were being absorbed alive. At the end. Exactly when his arrival would matter most. Dorian said nothing.
There wasn't time, but he didn't let the thought disappear either. There would be a conversation after this, assuming any of them lived long enough to have it. Wilhelm lowered his hand. The undead army collapsed around them simultaneously, bodies crumbling into dust that blew across the ruined courtyard. Fifteen survivors remained among everything Wave Eight had taken, bloodied and exhausted but still breathing. The System offered no congratulations.
[WAVE 9 INCOMING]
[FINAL WAVE OF THE BLITZ ROUNDS!]
The countdown began immediately. Dorian tightened his grip around the Fang as shadows stirred around his boots. Around him, everyone noticed the timer one by one. Relief disappeared from their faces as weapons were lifted again and the potions Wilhelm had given them were swallowed as quickly as possible. Whatever rest they had thought his arrival purchased was already over. Wave Nine was coming.