"A-A-A-A-A-A-A!!!"
A desperate, vocal-cord-tearing scream ripped through the stale air of the cave. Bell threw himself forward, forgetting fear, forgetting his instinct for self-preservation. In his tunnel vision, there was only one target—the mountain of brown muscle that had swept aside his partner.
The Minotaur didn't even take a fighting stance. The monster, towering over the boy like a living boulder, merely snorted in contempt, blowing thick plumes of steam from its wide nostrils. In its bloodshot, unnaturally intelligent eyes, there was no blind fury. Instead, a twisted, sadistic mockery rippled within them. The predator was relishing the pathetic rebellion of its prey.
Bell pushed himself to the absolute limit. His legs launched him off the uneven floor with such force that his muscles cramped. He closed the distance in a fraction of a second, sliding beneath a careless, lazy swipe of a clawed hand. The air above his head tore with a hum from a blow capable of shattering a stone pillar.
Putting all his weight, all his hatred and despair into the motion, Bell drove his dagger into the monster's thigh.
Clang.
It sounded as if steel had struck a solid anvil. The recoil numbed his arm all the way to the shoulder. The dagger's blade, which easily sliced through goblin hide, merely skittered off the Minotaur's thick, calloused skin without leaving a single scratch.
The monster let out a guttural growl—it sounded like a laugh. It didn't strike back. Instead, it simply stepped forward, shoving Bell back.
The boy circled the giant, landing blow after blow. A thrust to the flank, a slash at the shin, an attempt to reach the hamstring. It was all in vain. His weapon bounced off the monstrous armor. Bell was gasping for air, sweat pouring into his eyes, his heart beating against his ribs like a trapped bird. He was giving a hundred and ten percent, his body moving faster than it ever had in training, but to the Minotaur, he was nothing more than an annoying insect.
The monster was playing with him. It intentionally missed, letting its massive fists shatter the stone mere centimeters from Bell's face, reveling in the way the boy flinched and tumbled desperately across the dusty floor.
I can't pierce it... No matter what! Panic began to flood Bell's mind like ice water.
Gritting his teeth, he remembered his lesson. His hand darted to his belt. His fingers found the canvas bag. Bell squeezed it in his fist so hard the fabric tore.
The Minotaur, tiring of the game, drew back for a final strike. A wide horizontal sweep that was impossible to dodge.
Bell dropped to his knees, letting the deadly arm pass over him, and, snapping upright, threw the contents of his fist right into the beast's looming face.
A thick cloud of hot pepper struck the Minotaur directly in the eyes and nostrils.
The monster roared, but not in pain—in annoyance. The plan that had worked perfectly on the stupid lizards had misfired. The high-level monster wasn't blinded. It merely shook its head furiously; its eyes grew even redder, streaming with tears, but through the haze, it could still see its target. The mockery in its gaze was replaced by pure, unyielding malice.
A giant palm shot forward faster than the eye could track.
Bell didn't even have time to jump back. Fingers as thick as young tree trunks closed around his torso. The air was knocked from his lungs with a whistle. The boy was lifted off the ground.
The Minotaur slowly, savoring the moment, brought its prey up to its face. A fetid breath, smelling of rotten blood and raw meat, hit Bell's nose.
The squeezing began.
It wasn't a sharp, bone-snapping jerk. The monster tightened its fingers millimeter by millimeter. Bell's ribs groaned pitifully. Pain pierced his chest, blinding him. The boy kicked his legs desperately in the air, his fist with the dull dagger hammering against the monster's thick wrist over and over, but the blows grew weaker and weaker.
Bell tried to inhale, but his lungs were crushed in an iron vise. Black spots swam before his eyes. A steady ringing built in his ears.
No... not like this... the thought thrashed in his fading consciousness.
He felt the first rib crack. A soundless, strangled wheeze escaped his lips. In absolute, suffocating despair, just as the darkness was ready to swallow him, Bell squeezed his eyes shut and, with his last ounce of strength, pleaded into the void of his own mind:
Rane!!
And suddenly, the pressure stopped.
The grip hadn't disappeared, the fingers were still holding him in the air, but the deadly squeezing ceased.
Bell forced his bloodshot eyes open. The Minotaur was no longer looking at him. The monster's head was jerked back unnaturally, and primal confusion splashed in its bovine eyes.
Right behind the horned head, mounted on the monster's broad, muscular back, was Rane.
Bell barely recognized his brother. Rane's face was twisted in a horrific, inhuman grimace of extreme physical strain. His skin was flushed red from exertion, and thick, pulsating veins bulged on his neck and temples, looking as if they might burst at any second. But the most terrifying thing was his eyes. The amber irises had drowned in a blood-red sea of ruptured vessels, radiating an eerie, frightening glow—the same look Bell had caught a glimpse of in the tavern, but now magnified a hundredfold.
Rane's left arm was wrapped rigidly around the Minotaur's oak-thick neck. This hold couldn't choke the monster—the beast's anatomy didn't allow the airways to be cut off that way. But Rane wasn't trying to. His left hand locked in a death grip onto his own right forearm, creating an unbreakable vise, locking the monster's head in place.
Rane opened his mouth wide. What tore from his throat wasn't a scream, but a roar—vibrating, tearing his vocal cords, filled with transcendent pain and rage. It was directed precisely into the beast's sensitive ear canal.
"LET GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!"
The sound wave, amplified by the unnatural state of Rane's body, hit the Minotaur's eardrums like a battering ram.
Thick black blood sprayed from the monster's ear. The beast let out a deafening squeal, full of disorientation and agony. The instinct for self-preservation forced its muscles to unclench. The fingers opened, and Bell dropped to the stone floor like a sack.
The Minotaur, recovering from the shock, roared. Its body coiled for a monstrous spinning backhand—a giant palm with extended claws meant to sweep the insolent pest off its back, turning him into a bloody smear on the wall.
But at the exact moment the beast's muscles began to contract, Rane tensed his entire body and pushed off the broad back with a powerful thrust of his legs. He flew backward a fraction of a second before the deadly palm ripped through the air where his torso had just been.
Bell, lying on his side and gasping the dusty air, witnessed this impossible, unbelievable pirouette. The world around him faded, the pain in his broken ribs became unbearable, and the saving darkness finally completely swallowed his consciousness.
***
Cold. Rough, damp stone against his cheek.
Rane's body felt like a sack of broken glass. The pain wasn't sharp; it spread like a leaden weight through every nerve cell, paralyzing his limbs. His spine burned like fire after the double impact against the wall.
He lay face down, unable to move even a finger. A thick, muffled ringing filled his head. Through this haze, sounds began to break through. Dull, distorted, they echoed as if from the bottom of a deep well.
Grandpa... the voice was quiet, full of boredom and teenage apathy.
Gramps! the same voice, but now carrying the thrill and joy of victory in a virtual battle.
And suddenly the ringing shattered.
Rane!!!
Bell's scream. Full of genuine terror, despair, and pain.
Rane's eyes snapped open. Pain drove a red-hot nail into his brain, but he forced his vision to focus. Out of the corner of his eye, through the veil of dust, he saw a horrific scene: the Minotaur slowly, sadistically lifting Bell off the ground, preparing to crush him.
His muscles refused to obey, but his mind rejected the limitation.
Gritting his teeth until blood welled on his lips, Rane reached out with his left hand. Millimeter by millimeter. His nails scraped against the stone, tearing bloody. Every movement echoed with a flash of agony in his broken ribs. His hand trembled but stubbornly crawled toward his belt, to where his pouch hung.
His fingers found the glass edges. Yanked it from the pouch. Tore the stubborn cork off with his teeth, ignoring the glass crunching against his lips. Down the hatch. A second vial. Down the hatch. The empty bottles rolled silently into the dust.
The medicine burned his throat, exploding into icy flames within his body. The potions forcefully, with a sickening creak, knitted his shattered ribs back together and stitched his torn tissues.
But it wasn't enough. Too slow. Bell was already wheezing in the monster's vise.
Rane squeezed his eyes shut. His willpower, honed over decades of a past life, hammered against his internal barriers. The limiters collapsed.
Thump-thump...
The first beat echoed in his temples like a heavy blacksmith's hammer. He consciously sent his heart into overdrive. The muscle violently surged in his chest, forcefully driving thick, scalding blood through his veins. His blood pressure skyrocketed to a critical point. The capillaries in his eyes burst, instantly flooding the whites with crimson, dyeing the world the color of blood.
Thump-thump. Thump-thump...
The pain of his injuries vanished, erased by primal adrenaline. All that remained was a ringing, terrifying clarity. The air thickened. Time stretched.
Rane tore himself from the floor, scooping up the jagged shard of his sword on the move. His own muscles popped and cracked from the extreme, destructive overload as he launched himself onto the Minotaur's broad back in a single blurred motion. The neck grapple. The roar that tore his vocal cords. The spray of hot black blood from the monster's ruptured ear.
The beast's grip loosened, and Bell plummeted down like a sack.
Feeling the giant's colossal muscles bunching beneath him for a deadly spinning strike, Rane tensed his legs and launched himself off the brown back.
Thump-thump. Thump-thump. Thump-thump...
He landed heavily on bent legs, absorbing the momentum, and cast a barely noticeable glance at his brother's motionless body. He's breathing.
The Minotaur thrashed its head wildly. Blood poured from its torn ear, and complete disorientation could be read in its rage-filled eyes.
Rane didn't wait. The pounding in his own chest was escalating, turning into a continuous roar, counting down the seconds until his body burned itself out from the inside from such exertion.
He gripped the sword shard until his knuckles turned white and stepped forward. In a straight line, directly into the giant's zone.
The Minotaur roared at the sight of a new, pitiful target before it. A massive fist crashed down from above, intending to drive the human into the floor.
Thump-thump-Thump-thump-Thump-thump...
Rane didn't dodge with a wide sidestep. He merely shifted his torso slightly to the right and dropped a couple of centimeters. The hairy fist whistled past a millimeter from his cheek, washing his face in the smell of dust and sweat. The impact shook the cave; stone fragments sprayed in all directions.
Without losing a fraction of a second, Rane drove his arm with the sword shard forward. The strike landed dead center on the broad, brown chest.
Clack. A dull, ineffective sound. The short shard couldn't pierce the tough hide.
The Minotaur snorted contemptuously, sweeping its free hand in a backhand strike. Rane ducked, letting the deadly limb pass over his head, and struck again. With the exact same motion. In the exact same spot. Down to the millimeter.
Clack.
The fight turned into a frenzied, accelerating dance of death. The Minotaur attacked furiously, relentlessly. Flurries of blows capable of leveling a small building rained down on Rane.
But the human seemed to become a ghost. His evasions were terrifyingly minimalist. He slipped between the fists, ducked under the wide swings, flowed around the monster's legs. No wasted movements. No loss of balance.
And after every evasion followed a short, hard strike.
Clack. Clack. Clack.
The exact same sound. The exact same spot.
The arrogance in the Minotaur's eyes began to shift into absolute frenzy. It was a middle-floor monster. It vastly outclassed this prey in strength, speed, and durability many times over. But it couldn't land a hit. The little bug wasn't just avoiding the blows—it boldly stayed within arm's reach, stinging with its blunt piece of iron.
Thump-thump-Thump-thump-Thump-thump-Thump-thump...
The roaring in Rane's ears became deafening. His muscles burned, the veins on his arms bulged as if worms were writhing beneath his skin. His body was screaming for mercy. The technique was devouring his own lifeforce.
Pushed to the brink, the Minotaur let out an ear-splitting roar. It raised both hands high above its head, putting all its monstrous mass, all its frustration and wrath into the strike.
Rane was waiting for this. He watched the falling arms and didn't move until the last, unimaginable fraction of a second. And then he pushed off sharply with both legs, the soles of his boots sliding backward over the stone debris.
Two fifty-pound fists slammed into the floor.
The stone cracked, and a dense, impenetrable cloud of dust and shrapnel erupted into the air, completely obscuring the combatants.
A second of ringing silence.
The dust began to slowly settle. The Minotaur stood in the center of the crater. Unharmed. It was breathing heavily, nostrils flaring, and upon seeing Rane's figure kneeling ahead, it let out a mocking, triumphant howl. It had shown its might. The bug had retreated.
But the howl cut off on a high note.
Suddenly, on the monster's brown, impenetrable chest—in the exact spot where Rane had struck time after time with manic precision—the flesh split open.
The horny layer, weakened by dozens of micro-fractures from the pinpoint strikes, failed to withstand the colossal strain of the Minotaur's own muscles during its final blow. The hide burst, forming a perfect, bloody cross, intersecting exactly where the monster's core of life pulsated beneath the bones—its magic stone.
Black blood geysered from the wound.
The Minotaur froze, its eyes staring in shock at its own chest. It shifted its gaze to Rane. And then the unthinkable happened. The massive, terrifying Minotaur, its entire body trembling, unconsciously took a step backward.
The human, leaning heavily on his shattered sword, forced himself to take a step forward. His face was pale as death, and his eyes burned with a horrifying crimson light.
But that was where Rane's stride ended.
THUMP-THUMP-THUMP-THUMP-THUMP-THUMP-THUMP-THUMP-THUMP-THUMP-THUMP-THUMP-THUMP-THUMP-THUMP-THUMP-THUMP-THUMP-THUMP-THUMP-THUMP-!!!
His heart stumbled. The rhythm broke.
Rane felt as if a grenade had detonated inside his chest. A searing, unbearable pain shot straight through his ribcage. He collapsed onto one knee. The sword shard clattered from his numb fingers. A terrible, gurgling cough tore from his throat, and bright, arterial blood splattered onto the gray stone.
His body, having exhausted all its reserves, instantly shut down, paralyzed by the overload. Rane pitched forward, burying his face in the dust.
The Minotaur, seeing that the threat had passed, shook off its stupor. Its fear instantly transformed into absolute, seething rage. The monster lowered its horned head, pawed the floor with its hoof, and with the roar of an oncoming avalanche, charged at the motionless body.
Rane lay on his side, unable to even close his eyes. He watched death approach. Massive hooves measured out the final meters of his life.
So this is it, a calm, detached thought flickered through his mind.
And a fraction of a second before the horns could pierce his body, as his consciousness finally faded to black, a blindingly bright yellow flash illuminated his vision.