The outside of the walls was still in rampage, with the Hydra killing both the kingdom forces and Pandemonium troops, clearly having no side or team.
When the middle Hydra head snatched a person with its mouth, the other head tried to steal the meal, tearing the person's body into two while blood splattered across the battlefield.
Grimwatch was shocked at the scene, and Elyndra was as well.
"God... we have to do something."
Elyndra nodded, and Grimwatch gripped his sword tightly while taking a stance.
"Right behind you," she said before she applied something to Grimwatch, allowing him to use his power at one hundred and twenty percent.
The heavy plate armor of Grimwatch clanked with a deliberate, lethal rhythm as he stepped into the clearing. Facing the snarling Hydra, he didn't raise a shield; he simply adjusted the grip on his massive greatsword, his movements precise and devoid of hesitation.
The Hydra sensed something when one of its heads locked onto Grimwatch, then the others followed as the body shifted toward his direction, sensing his magical spite before hissing aggressively.
Grimwatch kicked off the ground, the earth fracturing under the sheer force of his Agility and Strength. As the Hydra leaped, jaws agape, he triggered a high-tier skill technique.
"Mezzano."
His blade glowed with a blinding, incandescent white light, trailing streaks of blue magical spite as it carved through the air.
Then he performed a horizontal swing so fast it created a vacuum. The blade passed through the Hydra's left head with a high-pitched schwing—a sound like glass shattering.
Time seemed to stutter for a fraction of a second. The Hydra's body froze in mid-air before it was hit directly, cutting the head clean off.
While the body of the Hydra fell to the ground with a loud thud, the left head was completely severed but still moving, while the two remaining heads stayed alive and attached to the body.
For a moment, the battlefield went quiet—not completely, but enough to feel it.
Soldiers were still fighting, steel was still clashing, and men were still dying. But thousands of eyes had witnessed it.
The impossible.
A Hydra head had been cut off.
Kingdom soldiers stared in disbelief, their voices cutting through the noise in broken fragments.
"He cut it..." one Spartan soldier said.
Somewhere in the battlefield "Did he just cut its head off?!"
The other come to said "That thing was tanking everything!"
Nearby Pandemonium troops looked equally stunned, their own shock mirroring the enemy's.
"No way...that monster survived ballista fire."
An elite soldier speaking to himself "How strong is that knight?"
The severed head continued thrashing violently across the ground, its jaws snapping wildly as dark blood poured from the neck stump in thick, pulsing waves.
Rook watched from the frontlines, his spear lowering slightly as he stared at Grimwatch standing alone before the creature.
"...So that's why they call him Grimwatch."
Beside him, Omen remained silent, his eyes never leaving the Hydra.
"Don't celebrate yet." Rook looked toward him, but Omen's expression remained completely unchanged. "Hydras don't die that easily."
Across another section of the battlefield, Asura had stopped moving entirely, his crimson eyes narrowing as he watched the severed head roll across the dirt.
"Impressive..." A faint grin crossed his face as his gaze shifted toward the remaining two heads. "But if that thing regenerates... the real fight starts now."
Further behind the lines, Steelbeard stood atop a pile of broken shields and corpses, his massive axe resting on one shoulder while his beard shifted in the wind. Then he laughed—a deep, booming laugh that made several nearby soldiers jump.
"HAHAHAHA!"
Steelbeard pointed his axe toward Grimwatch, his voice carrying over the chaos like a war drum. "That's it, lad! Show that oversized lizard what a real warrior looks like!"
Around them, hope began spreading through parts of the kingdom army since the Hydra had appeared. They had watched hundreds die, watched entire formations collapse, and watched the monster tear through friend and foe alike without slowing.
But now they had seen it bleed. They had seen it lose a head.
And suddenly, the Hydra no longer looked invincible.
Then the remaining two heads slowly turned toward Grimwatch, both pairs of eyes locking onto him at once. The hissing stopped, and the battlefield wind itself seemed to grow heavier around him.
And everyone watching realized the same thing at the same moment, Grimwatch had just become the Hydra's favorite target.
The two remaining heads struck simultaneously.
Grimwatch read the left head and ducked, the jaws snapping shut where his skull had been half a second earlier. But the right head came lower, catching him across the chest with a glancing bite that sent him skidding backward across the blood-soaked dirt. His boots carved two long trenches through the battlefield before he planted himself, chest heaving and teeth grinding behind his visor.
The armor held.
Barely.
Three deep puncture dents now marked the breastplate where the Hydra's teeth had pressed against the metal. Without the plate, those fangs would've gone clean through him.
Elyndra was already moving.
She came in from the flank, her hands weaving rapid sigil patterns as twin arcs of destructive energy lashed from her palms, striking the right head across the snout and snapping it sideways with a crack of impact. The head recoiled immediately, snarling violently while dark ichor ran from a fresh gash above its jaw.
"Grimwatch, on your feet—left side, now!"
He was already moving.
The greatsword rose as the left head lunged again. He met it with a brutal upward slash that deflected the bite and opened a long gash across the creature's neck.
The Hydra screamed—a horrible multi-toned shriek that rattled the bones of every soldier within fifty yards.
Kingdom soldiers covered their ears, Pandemonium troops did the same.
The sound alone felt wrong.
Then something shifted the severed neck stump began to move.
Not to bleed or rot, but to move.
The flesh at the base of the cut neck pulsed like a heartbeat while black veins spread outward from the wound in rapid branching lines. The soldiers who had been cheering moments ago went silent again.
One Spartan stared.
"No..."
Another slowly stepped backward.
"Don't tell me..."
Even Rook's expression hardened and Omen had already looked away as though he couldn't bear to confirm what he already knew.
Then it split.
Where one head had been, two new necks tore through the regenerating stump with a wet, sickening crack of bone restructuring itself. Flesh twisted. Tendons stretched. Scales grew across newly formed skin.
Smaller than the original.
But growing.
Already growing, now there were four heads.
The battlefield froze.
"What the hell is that thing?!"
"It grew back!"
"How do you kill something like that?!"
Even several Pandemonium soldiers looked horrified.
"Belladonna never said it could do that."
"Forget the kingdom—it's gonna kill all of us."
Steelbeard stared at the Hydra as the fourth head finished forming.
The laughter from earlier was gone.
"By the ancestors..."
Even he looked disturbed.
Asura narrowed his eyes from across the battlefield a faint grin remained on his face, but it wasn't amusement anymore.
"Interesting..."
His gaze remained locked onto the creature.
"So cutting the heads off makes it worse."
The four heads hissed together sound echoed across the plains.
"Fall back!" Elyndra shouted, but even she didn't move immediately, frozen for a brief moment by the sight.
Grimwatch didn't fall back.
He charged.
It was the wrong decision, and some part of him knew it, but something in his blood refused to let him retreat. Not here. Not in front of thousands watching.
He triggered Mezzano again.
The blade ignited in that same blinding white and blue light, magical spite surging across the steel as he swung toward the closest neck with everything the substance had left in him.
The Hydra caught his blade between two heads.
Not with its neck with its jaws.
Two heads closed around the flat of the greatsword from opposite sides simultaneously before wrenching it with a torque so violent that Grimwatch left the ground entirely.
Rook's eyes widened.
"Grimwatch!"
The warrior was thrown thirty feet through the air before slamming into a collapsed siege wall with a crash that shook the rubble around him.
Stone exploded outward while dust filled the air he didn't immediately rise.
While Elyndra fired everything she had.
Spell after spell screamed across the battlefield, lighting the Hydra in cascading explosions of force, fire, and raw magical pressure. Each impact rocked the creature sideways and bought a second.
Maybe two but it kept walking.
Kept advancing.
The new heads were fully grown now, and where the creature had once moved with the erratic hunger of a beast, it now moved with something closer to intent.
It was done being annoyed now it was angry.
Grimwatch pulled himself from the rubble, one gauntlet cracked while his vision swam inside the helmet.
The substance was still burning through his veins he could feel it.
That unnatural heat behind his eyes.
His muscles screaming louder than they should be, one hundred and twenty percent of his natural output.
He had been fighting at limits the human body was never designed to sustain and it still wasn't enough.
Elyndra appeared beside him, breathing hard while one hand pressed against a gash on her forearm where a piece of debris had caught her.
"We can't kill it."
Her voice was steady.
Her eyes weren't.
Grimwatch stared at the four-headed Hydra as it rose to its full height before them, all four necks swaying slowly in that horrible synchronized motion while all eight eyes locked onto the two of them.
He didn't argue.
"Then we hold it."
Elyndra looked at him.
Around them, soldiers from both armies were already backing away.
Even the Pandemonium troops wanted no part of this.
"We hold it," Grimwatch repeated as he raised the greatsword one more time, "until someone figures out how."
The Hydra lunged ground shook beneath its weight.
The four heads descended together and the two of them met it head-on, knowing full well they were fighting something the world had never given them the tools to kill.