The circle closed, and the desert gave them no room for anything except each other.
Eight remained. The scar-faced leader still had not moved from his position at the rear. Eryndor noted that and filed it away — a man who waits while his people work is either confident or cautious, and neither interpretation was reassuring.
The first man came in fast with a wide, committed swing. Eryndor pivoted left, deflected the blade with a forearm sweep, and returned with two sharp strikes — ribs, then temple. The man went down.
A scimitar flashed low from his right, aimed at his thigh. He vaulted over it, turned in the air, and brought his heel across the attacker's skull on the way down. The impact jarred his ankle. He landed unevenly, recovered, and moved.
Two charged together. He caught the first man's thrust on his forearm brace and guided it past him, rotating with the motion to drive his elbow into the man's temple. The second blade was already coming — he back-stepped, ducked under the slash, and lunged low with a strike to the inside of the man's knee. The raider dropped with a cry. Eryndor's rising uppercut caught his jaw before he could raise his head again.
Four down. His forearm ached from the blocks. His ankle was still complaining.
The remaining five spread wider, tightening the ring, and Eryndor felt the mana settle through him like a slow exhale — not fire, not force, but clarity. Every flicker of sand at the edge of his vision registered. Every shift of weight, every glint of steel, every half-drawn breath stood out against the noise like words on a clean page. It was the one thing the Temple's sparring practice had given him that he had never resented.
A spear drove straight at his ribs. He struck the shaft aside with a sharp punch and jabbed at the raider's face — the man jerked his head back just enough, and the jab glanced. Eryndor moved to follow with a side kick.
Too slow.
A blade caught him across the shoulder from the right — not deep, but clean. A line of heat opened along the muscle and he back-stepped hard, putting distance between himself and the press. He gritted his teeth. The sleeve was already wet.
They pressed the advantage immediately, the way trained fighters do when they sense the first blood. Steel came from two directions at once. He caught one strike on the brace — the impact rattled up his arm to the shoulder and the wound shrieked — and ducked under the second. A blade whispered through the air where his neck had been a heartbeat before.
He dropped low, ignoring the shoulder, and steadied his breath.
"Alright," he said quietly. "Come on, then."
The leader stepped forward.
He was broader than the others and moved differently — with the unhurried weight of someone who had never needed to rush. Tattered desert leathers, scars like cracked stone across his face, a scimitar whose edge had been darkened with old oil. When he advanced, the sand itself seemed to shift in response, as though it recognized the difference in him.
The first strike came from above — fast and brutal, dropping straight down. Eryndor crossed both forearms and caught it on the brace. The impact drove him a full step backward into the sand, the force traveling up through his arms and detonating in his already-wounded shoulder. He swallowed the sound that tried to come out.
The second strike came immediately after — horizontal, low, and vicious. Eryndor twisted just enough. The blade opened a long, shallow cut across his side instead of gutting him. Fire raced along his ribs as the fabric tore.
He stumbled back. The leader followed without pause.
A thrust came at his stomach. He knocked it wide — and a knee drove into his abdomen. The air left him in a sharp burst and he dropped to one knee, rolling on instinct as the scimitar stabbed down through the space his spine had occupied. He kicked off the ground, pivoted tightly, and cracked his heel against the leader's wrist. The grip loosened.
It did not break.
The leader was more irritated than hurt. He pressed back in, measured and relentless, and Eryndor felt what fighting someone near the Royale tier actually meant — not just the strength of each individual blow, but the way the man's cultivated mana worked like a tide, constant and accumulating, wearing down every block and parry until Eryndor's arms were heavy and his legs were absorbing force they were not designed to absorb.
A slash opened his upper arm. Another strike jolted his brace hard enough that his fingers went briefly numb. Blood darkened the sand in small, regular drops.
He ducked beneath a wide sweep and countered with an elbow to the leader's ribs, a palm strike to the throat. Small hits, precise, aimed at the weak points that existed even in stronger opponents. They slowed the next swing by half a heartbeat. That was all they accomplished, and Eryndor knew it.
The leader wiped blood from his lip with the back of his wrist and smiled — slow and feral, the smile of a man who understood exactly how the arithmetic was working.
Eryndor reset his stance. His mana was ebbing, thinning at the edges the way it did when the body had too many other problems demanding its attention. Three wounds. A shoulder that had stopped cooperating fully. Lungs working harder than they should in the heat and dust.
One mistake now would finish it.
The remaining four surged back in around the leader, tightening from all sides. A blade came from behind. Eryndor spun, barely — and felt the instinct sharpen, the same whisper along his spine that had saved him twice already in this fight. He trusted it. He dropped low as steel sliced through the air above him, sand spraying into his eyes.
He made the calculation in the half-second he had.
Enough.
He rolled beneath a swing, yanked a small orb from his satchel, and threw it into the center of the ring. It detonated in a burst of blinding light and compressed air — not powerful enough to harm, but more than enough to scatter equilibrium. The raiders staggered, cursing, hands going to their eyes. Eryndor was already running.
He went for the ruin's entrance — a dark gap in the stone where the outer wall had partially collapsed — and plunged into it. Behind him, shouts and the thud of boots in sand. The corridor inside was narrow and obsidian-walled, swallowing the desert light almost immediately. His own footsteps became the loudest thing in the world.
"Good," he muttered between breaths, pressing his bleeding arm against his ribs as he ran. "Small spaces. Single file. Nine against one becomes one against one."
The corridor branched. He took the narrower fork without slowing, scraping his wounded shoulder against the wall and gritting his teeth at the sensation. The shouts behind him were closer than he would have liked.
Then the corridor ended.
Not in a wall — in a chamber. A wide crack in the inner stonework had opened into a hidden room, sheltered behind a section of collapsed outer wall. The air here was different: still and ancient and dry in a way that had nothing to do with the desert outside. Collapsed shelves lined the walls, their contents spilled across the floor in frozen rivers of parchment and shattered clay. Sigils marked the stone at intervals — deliberate, carefully spaced, the kind left not as decoration but as instruction.
Eryndor moved carefully, stepping around the debris, breathing as quietly as the pain in his side would allow. The shouts from the corridor had grown muffled. He pressed himself against the inner wall and listened.
His heel struck something that was not stone.
He froze. Tapped it again, gently. The sound that came back was hollow — a cavity beneath, sealed rather than collapsed. He crouched slowly, ignoring the protest from his ribs, and brushed the centuries of dust aside with his uninjured arm.
A door. Set flush into the floor, sealed with a mechanism he could not immediately parse, its surface engraved with a single symbol at the center.
He had seen that symbol before. Not here — in the texts. In the margins of the passages the Temple had classified as mythology. In the fragments he carried at the bottom of his satchel.
He was still staring at it when a body hit the wall behind him.