Soren's head snapped up.
The cracks of splitting wood rolled through the crypt from every direction at once, harsh enough to cut cleanly through the pounding in his skull.
Coffins that had sat undisturbed for who knew how many years shuddered where they lay stacked against the walls or half-sunk into the stone floor, then gave way one after another as rotten lids broke inward under sudden force.
Skeletons rose from inside them.
Some dragged themselves up in jerky motions, ribs catching briefly on splintered wood before wrenching free.
Others sat up all at once, empty sockets turning toward him with that terrible lack of hesitation unique to things that did not feel pain, did not think, and did not need courage to advance.
Bones scraped over stone.
Jawbones worked soundlessly, then not so soundlessly, as more and more of them pulled themselves out of the wreckage and converged on the only living thing in the room.
Within seconds, he was surrounded.
Soren inhaled sharply and adjusted his grip on the handaxe in his left hand.
It felt heavier than it should have, though he knew that was his body more than the weapon, the lingering strain from too little sleep, too many thoughts, and too much pressure wound too tight inside his chest for too many days in a row.
A small flame gathered in his right palm as he fed mana into [Ignition], not enough to flare yet, only enough to feel its shape settle in his hand and remind himself that the spell was there.
'Focus.'
His pulse was quick, but not wild.
His hands were not steady, but they were steady enough.
'Don't start imagining the worst that could happen. Just focus.'
So he did.
Skeletons.
A lot of them, sure, but still, they were skeletons.
Their movements were clumsy, their bodies brittle, and their threat simple.
They were the sort of enemy that could become dangerous through numbers and carelessness rather than any real sophistication.
He had fought worse when he had been weaker than this, and he knew that.
He knew it objectively, even if the part of him that had spent the last several days replaying Alex's golden light and his own humiliation wanted very badly to forget.
Then his gaze shifted past them, toward the far end of the crypt, and his shoulders tightened.
Above a stone sarcophagus floated a wraith.
Its shape was thin and tattered, like old cloth hung in deep water, all shadow and drifting edges, a human outline only in the most unhelpful sense.
Its face was not a face at all, only a hollow patch of deeper darkness beneath the hooded fold of its form.
Unlike the skeletons, it did not rush.
It hovered there and watched, still enough to feel deliberate.
Soren's jaw set.
'That one's the problem.'
Skeletons he could handle with an axe, with divine power, or with his hands if he had to.
The wraith was different.
Physical strikes would pass through it uselessly.
Only magic or divine power would work, which meant the skeletons were not the real threat here so much as the clutter between him and the thing that mattered.
He moved before they fully boxed him in.
Soren thrust his right hand toward the floor near the densest cluster and cast at once.
"「Ignition」."
Fire rushed out low and fast, skimming across old wood, dry splinters, torn lining cloth, and collapsed coffin lids.
He wasn't trying to burn the skeletons down where they stood, though the nearest ones blackened where the flames licked up their legs and ribs.
He wanted light, space, and a room he could actually see in.
The crypt answered instantly.
Flames climbed broken planks and caught along the edges of coffin remains, spreading in jagged lines through the wreckage until the chamber filled with uneven firelight.
The darkness retreated into the far corners.
Sharp, moving shadows jumped across the stone walls.
The wraith's outline flickered more clearly now, and so did every skeleton closing in on him.
Now he could fight.
He let the flame run where it would, keeping half an eye on it without committing more focus than necessary; enough to avoid trapping himself, nothing more.
His left hand tightened on the axe.
Divine power gathered in his right palm, soft purplish-silver at first, then brighter as he pushed more into it.
The old fear tried to rise anyway.
What if he mistimed it?
What if he froze?
What if he embarrassed himself even here, underground and alone, against monsters that should not have mattered?
Soren's mouth hardened.
He was tired of that voice.
A skeleton lunged into range, all jerking limbs and reaching hands, and he answered it immediately.
"Stitch thy flesh, I end thy agony. 「Heal」."
The divine spell struck cleanly.
The skeleton came apart in an instant, not broken but erased, bones collapsing into ash and pale fragments that scattered across the floor where it had been.
Relief hit him fast, sharp and real, though not because he had doubted whether divine power would work on the undead; he already knew that.
It was relief because the first action had gone through cleanly, because his body had obeyed, because the incantation had answered him without hesitation.
Then the next skeleton stepped over the ash.
And the next.
And the next.
There was no room to linger in relief, so he didn't.
He stepped in.
The axe came down not with elegance but force, the side of the head smashing into a skeleton's temple hard enough to send the upper half of its skull sideways.
Before it could finish collapsing, he planted his boot against its sternum and shoved.
Brittle ribs gave at once, and the entire thing crashed backwards into the legs of another skeleton.
Both hit the floor in a tangle of white bone and old wood.
Soren moved through the opening they created without even thinking about it.
A third skeleton reached for his shoulder.
He caught its wrist with his right hand, divine light still half-formed around his palm, twisted hard enough to wrench the arm off at the elbow, then slammed the haft of the axe up under its jaw.
Teeth flew loose.
The body rocked back.
He finished the incantation point-blank against its chest and turned it to ash before the fragments had finished falling.
A fourth came in from the side.
He didn't even bother with a proper swing.
He kicked behind its knee, and when the leg buckled, he shoved it into the burning remains of a collapsed coffin.
It hit awkwardly, scattered its own balance, and he crushed its skull with the back of the axe before it could right itself.
None of it was graceful.
That was fine.
Grace had never been the point.
Two more pressed in together.
Soren ducked the first reaching hand, drove his shoulder into its ribcage, and used the impact to ram it sideways into the second.
The collision made both stagger.
He stepped around the outside rather than retreating, letting them obstruct each other, then smashed one across the back of the neck and drove divine power through the other before either could recover.
He kept moving.
Not in the measured, beautiful way someone like Alex moved, where every step was drilled into place and every angle clean, but in the ugly, practical way he had always fought when it mattered.
He used whatever the room gave him.
Ash underfoot, splintered wood, broken coffin edges, the stupid single-mindedness of things that only knew how to advance.
If one skeleton overextended, he yanked it off-line and let another crash into it.
If they clustered too tightly, he forced one down and let the others trip over it.
If a clean swing was awkward, he punched with the haft, shoved with his shoulder, stamped at ankles, drove an elbow into a sternum and followed with divine power before the thing had even finished folding.
The crypt filled with the constant dry impacts of bone against stone, bone against axe, and bone against other bone.
Soren's breathing roughened.
Heat from the flames built around him, thick enough that sweat began to gather at the back of his neck and between his shoulder blades.
Smoke pressed low in the room, not enough yet to choke him, but enough to sting his eyes every time he turned too sharply toward one of the burning coffin piles.
Still, he did not feel like he was losing.
Pressed, yes.
Surrounded, briefly.
Forced to keep thinking and moving without pause, certainly.
Losing, no.
That distinction mattered.
He realised it only a little at first, as more of an absence than a thought.
The expected panic was not arriving in full.
The dread that had sat in him since the duel, that humiliating certainty that he would come up short at the exact moment it mattered, kept trying to drag him backwards into itself and failing because his body was too busy proving something else.
A skeleton staggered toward him with one arm half-hanging from the shoulder.
Soren stepped inside its reach and smashed the flat of the axe across its collarbone.
Bone cracked.
Before it could finish falling, he caught the side of its skull with his boot and sent it sliding into another one's shins.
Both went down.
He killed one with divine power and buried the axe into the floor beside the other's head long enough to pin it in place, then stamped through its ribcage with a brutal downward kick that shattered the spine.
His chest rose and fell hard.
He pulled the axe free and turned.
Another two.
Then three.
He adjusted, pivoted, cast, and struck.
The rhythm built without asking permission.
At some point, the fight stopped feeling like a series of separate emergencies and started feeling like a room he was controlling.
Not perfectly.
Not beautifully.
But still.
That thought sat strangely in his head at first.
It was hard to accept because the last thing still bright in his memory was Alex beneath that gold light, stepping through Soren's best effort as though the difference between them was not a gap to be crossed but a fact of the world.
Hard to accept because Amelia was Amelia, because Lilliana was brilliant, because Olivia kept growing faster than she seemed like she should, because everyone around him was so easy to measure himself against and so difficult to look at without finding a new deficiency.
But that had always been the trap, hadn't it?
He smashed the axe head into a skeleton's face hard enough to cave it inward and thought, with a grim kind of clarity, that he had spent so long staring upward that he had started losing track of where he himself stood.
Another reached from behind.
He sensed it late, twisted with it instead of away, caught the forearm across his shoulder, and hurled the whole thing over his hip in a movement far uglier than proper technique.
It hit the floor in pieces, one leg snapping clean off on impact.
Soren crouched into the motion and burned the torso away with divine power before it could start clawing itself forward again.
His head still hurt.
His thoughts were still bruised in places he could not quite name.
None of that had disappeared.
Even so, the numbers in front of him kept dropping.
He remembered Rena Forest then, not because he wanted to but because the comparison rose on its own.
Back then, fewer than twenty goblins had felt like a nightmare with teeth.
Every exchange had carried that sickening sense that one mistake would be enough, one bad angle, one moment too slow, one misread movement, and it would all come apart around him.
He had survived that through desperation, luck, and sheer refusal to stop moving when his body wanted to collapse.
Now he was here, deep under a cemetery, surrounded by a roomful of undead, and however ugly this looked from the outside, he was handling it.
Not effortlessly; he was not going to lie to himself that way.
But well.
That mattered too.
He ducked under a flailing arm, drove his shoulder into a ribcage, and felt the whole skeleton rattle apart under the impact before finishing it with a short pulse of divine light.
Another one came in from the front.
He slammed the pommel of the axe into its mouth, stepped past it, hooked his foot behind its ankle, and yanked it backwards by the spine.
It hit the ground flat, and he never gave it the chance to rise.
His breath steamed hot behind his teeth.
Sweat ran into one eyebrow and stung, but he simply blinked it aside.
'I'm weak,' he thought, and for once it did not arrive as a condemnation, only a measurement. 'Compared to them, I'm pathetically weak.'
There was no point denying that.
No point pretending Amelia had not been monstrously strong, or Alex frighteningly gifted, or Olivia far above him in knowledge and control.
He was still behind.
He still had holes everywhere.
He still fought like someone who had learned by being cornered rather than coached.
The important thing was that the thought did not have to end there.
A skeleton came straight on, arms wide, and Soren met it with an axe blow so hard the skull burst apart and the body pitched sideways into a drift of ash.
He was weak.
But he was not useless.
He was not stagnant.
And he was not the same frightened boy who had nearly died against a handful of goblins because the world had demanded more of him than he could give.
The pressure in his chest eased by a degree so small he almost missed it.
Then another.
Then another.
It was not a revelation or a dramatic break.
Nothing in him suddenly healed.
The self-hatred was still there, wounded pride was still there, anxiety about the story and Alex and every consequence he could not predict was still there too.
But for a few breaths, while the last skeletons kept closing in and he kept putting them down, those things stopped being the only truths in the room.
Soren caught one skeleton by the shoulder and shoved it bodily into another.
Bone knocked bone aside.
He stepped through the gap they made, brought the axe around with both hands, and smashed the nearer one apart in a single brutal sideways blow.
A small smile tugged unexpectedly at the corner of his mouth.
It felt odd enough that he noticed it immediately.
But instead of correcting it, he let out a breath, low and rough, and the words left him almost under it.
"I'm doing fine."
Not great.
Not extraordinary.
Not chosen, blessed, or untouchable.
Fine.
Simply fine.
For him, right now, that was enough.
————「❤︎」————