"Jass!" Bonehead and Sam shouted her name in perfect unison, their voices cracking with fear and desperation as they immediately abandoned their current positions and began sprinting toward where their fallen party member lay motionless on the sandstone with blood beginning to stain it.
In doing so, the Elite Sand Golem shed the sodden outer layer of its body in a single, fluid motion. Dozens of tons of saturated sand sloughed away like dead skin, reducing its overall size and costing it a significant portion of its raw strength, but restoring the mobility and speed it had lost when the water compromised its structure.
It immediately retaliated, hurling multiple massive fists of compacted sand toward the two runners. Each projectile hardened into dense sandstone mid-flight, tearing through the air like ballista bolts capable of punching through castle walls.
Sam and Bonehead sprinted toward the fallen Jass with everything they had, legs pumping as adrenaline flooded their systems. They barely managed to dodge the massive, fist-shaped boulders of sandstone that screamed overhead and slammed into the platform around them, crushing a number of the few antlion corpses that remained and sending spiderweb cracks racing through the stone — fractures that threatened to collapse entire sections beneath their feet.
As they closed the distance to where Jass lay unmoving, the damage nearly brought them to a halt. Her chest had been driven inward as if struck by a giant's fist, ribs broken and jutting through torn armor and flesh, with only a fragment of the wooden shard still lodged in her liver — but her chest was still rising.
She was alive.
The sight of their fallen made Sam's stomach twist, bile rising in his throat as the full weight of what had happened hit him, while Bonehead could only feel an immense amount of guilt as his shadow flame-like eyes zeroed in onto the wooden shard embedded in her liver.
Both of them were so focused on reaching Jass and stabilizing her before she bled out from her internal injuries that their pace slowed for just a moment. Caught in their own frantic thoughts, neither noticed the final sandstone boulder hurtling straight toward them. The massive projectile struck Bonehead head-on, smashing into his lower body when he was less than fifty meters from reaching their fallen friend — and potentially saving her life.
The impact was absolutely catastrophic; Bonehead's skeletal lower half from the middle of his torso down simply shattered into fragments like glass struck by a hammer, bone dust and splinters exploding outward from the point of impact in a cloud of white powder that hung in the air, and his upper body was sent tumbling across the ground in a series of brutal impacts that saw him bounce and roll and skid across the rough sandstone before finally colliding with Jass's unconscious form in a tangle of broken bones and ripped cloth.
As this happened, Sam's eyes went wide as the reality set in — he had just watched a massive boulder smash into his friend, Bonehead's upper body crashing into Jass, who was already more than halfway to death. In that moment of distraction, the split second he tore his gaze from the battlefield to track Bonehead's trajectory, a fragment of shattered femur slammed into his shoulder with enough force to crack the bone beneath the flesh. White-hot pain lanced down his entire left side, his vision flaring to white for a heartbeat.
The Elite Sand Golem regarded the aftermath of its attack for a brief moment, its features smoothing back into a blank, faceless visage as its attention shifted toward the Antlion Prince. At the same instant, the Antlion Prince reverted to its assassin form and crossed the distance between them in a blur, spanning dozens of meters in a single heartbeat, and drove its left arm straight into the construct's chest, tearing out the glowing core at its center with enough force to fracture the crystalline structure.
Without hesitation or wasting another second of its time, the Antlion Prince lifted the core to its mandibles and began consuming it like an apple, devouring the energy within the core to accelerate its natural healing and mend the damage it had taken.
"Use the fucking Leave Ticket!" Deacon's voice roared down from above where he'd been pinned against the ceiling, the sound raw with rage, fear, and desperation that made it clear he was barely holding himself together.
Sam's head snapped upward to see Deacon free-falling through the air, apparently released from whatever sand magic had been holding him pinned to the ceiling. From what he could see as Deacon falling, there was a clearly visible hole straight through Deacon's torso, easily large enough to fit a fist through, the wound massive and bleeding profusely as he plummeted toward the platform.
"Use the fucking LEAVE TICKET! PUT ONE IN HER HANDS AND TEAR IT FOR HER!" Deacon screamed again with even more intensity than before, his voice breaking with emotion as rage and fear wreaked absolute havoc through his body and mind, made worse by the overwhelming itchiness that had spread across his entire torso and had begun seeping into his brain like poison, clouding his thoughts with pain and chemical interference from the Nerve Rush poison that was still actively destroying his nervous system from the inside out.
Snapping his attention back to the present, Sam took in the scene before him; the Elite Sand Golem had somehow died while he himself had been distracted by Bonehead getting a height reduction and crashing into the body of the almost dead Jass, was now reduced to a massive lifeless pile of sand, while the Antlion Prince had steam oozing out of his wounds as he began to steadily pick up its pace and coming right at them.
With each passing moment, as the world seemed to slow around him, Sam saw the Antlion Prince pick up speed. Calculating its current velocity, acceleration, and the top speed it had shown before, he knew, given the malice he felt from it and saw the way its remaining compound eye locked onto him, that he had at most seven seconds before its clawed arms would spear through his chest, just as they had Esmerelda.
"Fuck," Sam gritted out, clenching his teeth hard enough that he felt them creak under the strain as he dragged himself back onto his feet despite the agony radiating from his shattered shoulder, pain like red-hot nails being driven into the joint. He forced himself to look as Deacon hit the platform with a wet, smacking sound that made Sam flinch involuntarily.
Even then, Deacon was already pushing himself up despite the massive hole in his torso that should have killed him instantly. Sam watched as faint, dark red lines began blinking to life across Deacon's exposed skin beneath the blood and sand clinging to his body.
"Use the fucking Leave Ticket!" Deacon shouted at him. "FLOOR ZERO'S EMERGENCY HEALERS ARE RIGHT NEXT TO THE FUCKING TELEPORTER! USE THE FUCKING TICKET!"
Sam looked back to assess Bonehead and Jass, searching for any chance that both of them could still be saved. His heart sank like a stone dropped in water when he saw Bonehead struggling with his single remaining arm, his right arm, the only limb still attached to his torso after the boulder had destroyed the rest, trying to grab the nearest intact Health Potion nearby, as the packet of Leave Tickets he had, landed just a few feet beyond where he could reach.
Hundreds of potions, vials, parchments, books, journals, and other alchemical supplies lay scattered across the platform, having burst outward when his Spatial Satchel was destroyed by the impact. Most were shattered, their contents spilled or crushed where they had struck the stone.
Managing to grab an intact Health Potion, Bonehead fought to raise it to Jass's mouth with his one remaining arm, riddled with cracks and fractures like the rest of his body. He was held together by nothing but sheer willpower and his recently unlocked Racial Trait, which he was using to keep himself mostly intact and not crumbling into a pile of bones – regretting why he hadn't placed those Free Points of his into the durability of his bones and instead placed them into more Wisdom and Intelligence.
Sam's eyes locked onto Deacon's across the distance that separated them, and in that moment of perfect clarity, he saw all the emotions his party leader was experiencing written plainly across his face:
The fear of losing everyone he cared about, the rage at being unable to protect them, the guilt for getting them into this situation, the self-disgust at not being strong enough to have prevented it, the hopelessness of knowing that no matter what they did it wouldn't be enough — all of it etched across Deacon's blood-covered face in an expression Sam knew he would remember for the rest of his life, however long that turned out to be.
And Sam understood with absolute certainty that they were truly and utterly fucked, that there was no way they were all getting out of this alive no matter what desperate gambit they tried, that someone was going to die here on this blood-soaked platform no matter what they did or how hard they fought – not a single person in their group had it in them to use a Leave Ticket and risk leave the other person behind.
Loyalty was one hell of a shackle – binding even people without a lick of similar blood in them to be more tightly knit than family.
And with that realization settling into his bones like ice water filling his veins and making his hands go numb, Sam knew exactly what he needed to do to give the others even the smallest chance of survival.
Raising his staff above his head with both hands despite the screaming pain from his shattered shoulder that felt like his arm was being torn off at the socket, Sam reached inward toward his mana core and found it nearly empty from the sustained magical combat, barely containing enough energy to cast a single Manabolt at reduced power that probably wouldn't even scratch the Antlion Prince's chitin.
But he reached deeper still, into reserves he hadn't known he possessed, pushing past the natural limits of what a mage should attempt and into territory that his countless instructors had warned him would kill him if he wasn't careful.
With all his might and what little sanity he had left after watching his friends be torn apart, he let out a baleful roar as the Antlion Prince drew closer with each bounding stride that devoured the distance between them.
He unleashed every last drop of mana left in his core, and then more, drawing on the magic circle engraved directly into his chest from the ritual he had once mentioned to Deacon, undertaken in childhood as part of his family's tradition of marking their mages for greater power. He used that permanent enchantment as a catalyst for what he was about to do, even though he knew it would likely kill him – obliterate his own magic core for the power he would need.
The end of Sam's staff slammed into the platform with a boom that echoed across the chamber like thunder and made the entire structure shudder beneath everyone's feet, and the earth rippled outward from the impact point, traveling across the platform and headed straight toward where Bonehead and Jass lay in their desperate struggle to get the Health Potion administered while her chest continued to rise and fall.
"Earth Dome!"
Simultaneously, as the spell cast from Sam's staff, his mana core that he used as leverage against the magic circle branded into his chest — exploded just as the Antlion Prince closed the final meters between them in a burst of speed that made it seem like it teleported in front of him.
With bleary eyes, fighting to hold back the agonizing scream threatening to tear its way out of his throat, Sam suddenly found himself lifted into the air.
Looking down through blurred vision, he saw the Antlion Prince's left forearm buried deep in his chest with enough force that he felt his sternum crack and splinter, the claws punching through his ribcage and out his back as the creature lifted him completely off the ground as if he weighed nothing at all. Blood spurted from Sam's mouth in a hot gush as his lungs and heart were punched straight through.
As Sam was lifted into the air like a trophy, his final spell reached its intended targets dozens of meters away. A multilayered earth dome erupted from the ground around Bonehead and Jass, creating small shockwaves with each added layer, the stone growing, thickening, and reinforcing itself with every passing second. The barrier formed into a protective shell that would, hopefully, keep them safe from the Antlion Prince for a time and give them the chance to use the Leave Tickets — their only way out of this nightmare.
Snapping its gaze from its trophy toward the protected forms of its prey, the Antlion Prince let out a screech of frustration and violently whipped its arm to the side, flinging Sam's body away.
As Sam's body arced through the air, carried dozens of meters from where he had been standing, his eyes — still locked on the barrier he had created to protect his friends, watching it grow taller and thicker with each passing second — slowly shifted through the blood clouding his vision to find Deacon.
What Sam saw in that moment made his stomach flood with guilt – the despair and hopelessness in Deacon's eyes had spiked to such an extreme level that they looked completely empty of anything, pupils dilated so wide that they had taken over the majority of his crimson irises and left only thin rings of red visible around massive pools of black that seemed to contain nothing but an endless void that went down forever.
Sam's body hit the ground hard, rolling and tumbling across the bloodied platform like a rag doll thrown by a child, bouncing and skidding before coming to a scraping halt beside an antlion corpse.
What a… piss-poor fucking life, Sam thought to himself as he lay there with his chest torn open and his life rapidly draining away with each weakening heartbeat. Sam could only stare up at the distant ceiling of the massive chamber for a few brief moments as his vision began to fade at the edges, tunneling down to a single pinpoint.
But, dyin this way aint... so bad…
As his vision began to narrow at he stared at the ceiling, an overwhelming explosion of bloodlust suddenly flooded the entire room, an aura of killing intent so dense and oppressive that it felt like a physical weight pressing down on everything and making the air itself thick and difficult to breathe through, saturating the atmosphere with an overwhelming sense of primal fear and rage and fury that made even the Antlion Prince pause mid-step in its charge toward the earth dome to locate the source of this new threat.
A baleful roar erupted from Deacon's position that shook the entire massive chamber they had all fallen into hours ago, the sound so loud and filled with such raw emotion that loose sand and stone dust began falling from the ceiling in streams that looked almost like waterfalls, and the bloodlust intensified even further until it felt like the air itself was suffocating anyone who tried to breathe and making it nearly impossible to think clearly about anything other than the primal need to flee.
Deacon Hayes – The Mad Dog… what a fitting name.
A growing smirk spread across Sam's bloodied lower face as the light slowly left his eyes and his vision narrowed down to almost nothing, his final expression one of grim satisfaction despite the fact that he was dying on a blood-soaked platform hundreds of meters underground with a hole through his chest big enough to see through.
"Ge-t... him... Deke..." Sam whispered with the last breath in his ruined lungs that were filling with blood, then his eyes went glassy and still and the light behind them simply winked out like a candle being snuffed, and Samuel Elema Barrenthal died on the blood-soaked platform of Solomon's Fourth Temple with a smile on his face, an obliterated mana core, and the knowledge that he'd done everything he could to save his friends.