She held it.
There it is, Caelum thought. A force holding the line. Dawson had misjudged her from the beginning.
"Good!" he shouted at her. "Hold it there! Right there, don't move it!"
Blancard planted himself in front of her. Gauntlets up. "You heard him," he said. His voice was strained but steady enough.
The cyclops didn't care about any of that. It charged.
The club came down toward the middle of them—toward Kifah, toward Blancard. Blancard met it head-on because there was nothing else to do. Bulwark resonance thickened around his arms and shoulders, and he crossed both gauntlets above his head. Stone club met resonant steel and amber force, and the noise it made was like a structural beam failing. The impact drove Blancard into the stone floor up to his knees, cracks racing out from beneath his boots in every direction.
He held. Long enough for Caelum to think he might actually stop it.
Then the club punched through. Smashed across Blancard's guard and sent him flying into the chamber wall. Shoulder first. The sound was wrong—too heavy, too wet. He dropped, and one gauntlet sparked in erratic little bursts, and his left arm stayed where it fell.
"Blancard!" Kifah cried out.
The Blank field flickered. Wavered. Didn't drop, but close.
The cyclops stepped over him.
Éloise moved. Fast, faster than Caelum had seen from her, water coiled around the creature's ankle and pulled sideways while she drove her rapier at the other knee. She didn't have the strength to bring it down. But she threw off its balance. Made it stagger.
Dawson came in from the front. Blade lit up brighter than before, both hands on the grip, and he hacked into the damaged leg. Deeper this time. Dark blood splashed across the stone.
The cyclops roared and drove an elbow down into Dawson's back.
He crashed onto one knee. Gasped. Plasma stuttered wildly across his sword, and he almost lost it—a flare of violet shot into the ceiling and blew chunks of rock back down onto all of them. Caelum ducked a piece the size of his fist. One caught Éloise across the forehead and opened a thin red line above her brow. Blood ran down the side of her face. She didn't stop.
"Watch it!" she snapped at Dawson.
"Working on it!" Half fury, half no air left in his lungs.
Caelum found his spear. He went in low while the cyclops favoured its wounded leg. The gap opened just enough. Nothing clever about it, just the nearest soft target. He drove the spearhead back into the same cut and ripped it free to open the wound wider. Electricity discharged into exposed flesh. The smell hit—burnt meat.
The cyclops faltered. Shifted its weight.
Hurt.
The eye flared again. Brighter. Faster. Another resonance howl was building, and Caelum could already feel the pressure changing in the chamber, his skin crawling with it.
Kifah made a small sound. Barely audible.
"I can't hold another one of those," she said. No drama in it. Just the truth.
Dawson hauled himself upright next to Caelum, breathing through his teeth. The skin along his forearm had blistered where his own plasma had licked back over the hilt—angry red welts running up toward his elbow. His shoulder was turning a deep, bruised purple under torn uniform fabric. He looked wrecked. But he was doing the same calculation Caelum was, you could see it in his face.
"We need the eye," Dawson said.
"I know."
"I need a clean shot. One shot."
The cyclops raised the club again. Its wounded leg buckled under the weight, snarling. Éloise's water snapped around the weapon arm—couldn't stop it, just slowed the motion by a fraction. Blancard, somewhere behind them, groaned and forced himself onto one knee and drove his good gauntlet into the back of the creature's standing leg.
Nobody was doing this because they trusted each other, Caelum thought. They did it because they'd spent the last hours learning what the person next to them could actually do. Not the same as trust. Uglier. Messier. But it worked, or at least it was working now. Right now was all they had.
His eyes went to Dawson's blade. The violet plasma building along its edge, unstable, too hot, barely controlled. Then down to his own hands, his own current sitting restless and useless under his sternum.
Something clicked.
"Don't vent it," Caelum said.
Dawson looked at him. "What?"
"Charge the blade. Build it up, don't release it. I'll feed the current into you."
The look on Dawson's face went through about three stages in under a second. Confusion, understanding, then something that wasn't quite trust, but close enough. He didn't argue. First time for everything.
Dawson shifted his footing and brought the sword up with both hands. Point aimed at the cyclops's eye. Plasma gathered along the edge in a dense violet sheath, compressed instead of projected, building heavier and angrier with each second he held it.
Caelum stepped in close. He could feel the heat coming off the blade through his glove, the skin of his palm already protesting.
He grabbed Dawson's wrist with one hand and the flat of the blade with the other.
The heat bit through the glove instantly. He didn't pull away.
He opened the current.
Electrical resonance surged out of him in a hard blue flood—not into the cyclops this time but into Dawson's weapon, into the magnetic channels and plasma architecture that Dawson was white-knuckling to hold together. For one horrible second, it felt exactly like grabbing a live transit rail. Every nerve in his arm lit up, his jaw locked shut, his vision narrowed to a point, the taste of burning copper filling his mouth so thick he almost gagged on it.
Dawson's eyes went wide. "Ward—"
"Shoot."
Kifah threw the Blank field out one last time. Everything she had left. It caught the front edge of the cyclops's building howl and choked it, just enough, just barely.
Éloise yanked the water around the creature's neck and arm, twisting it. Hard. Its head wrenched to the side. Eye exposed.
Blancard drove upward with his shoulder into its hip.
Dawson fired.
The discharge that left the blade was nothing like his earlier shots. No wide flare, no wasted spread. It collapsed into a single lance of violet-blue energy, screaming, compressed into something that made the air tear apart around it.
It punched through the cyclops's eye. Through the back of its skull. Through the far wall of the chamber, it burrows into rock and sends molten stone running down the surface in thin orange lines.
For one instant, the entire room went white-violet, strobing off every wet surface, burning an afterimage into Caelum's retinas.
The cyclops stopped.
The club slipped from its fingers. Hit the floor. Boomed.
Then the body folded. Slow, heavy, final—like a building giving in. It hit the stone hard enough to shake the ceiling, and Caelum felt it through his boots and his aching ribs and somewhere deep in the back of his skull where the ringing hadn't stopped yet.
Quiet came down over the chamber. Almost as brutal as the noise had been.
Caelum let go of Dawson and stumbled backwards. Smoke curled up from what was left of his glove. Every nerve from shoulder to fingertips felt scorched through, the kind of pain that narrowed the world to a bright throbbing tunnel. Dawson went down, his sword dimming to plain dead metal as the last of the overcharged plasma bled away.
Kifah collapsed onto both knees. One hand clamped under her nose, blood welling between her fingers and dripping onto the stone.
Éloise wiped the blood off her forehead with the back of her wrist. Stared at the body. Her breath was coming faster than she would've wanted anyone to notice, but they all noticed.
Blancard sat against the wall. Grimacing. Cradling his left arm against his chest with his right.
Nobody got through it clean. But they got through it, and the thing on the floor wasn't going to get up again.
Dawson stared at the hole where the cyclops's eye had been. At the smoking exit wound in its skull. Then he looked at Caelum, and there was something on his face that wasn't gratitude—too complicated for that, too stubborn—but was maybe the first honest acknowledgement he'd given anyone outside his own strata since they'd been thrown together.
"That was a good idea," Dawson said. Voice raw.
Caelum leaned against his spear. Looked at the body, the dark blood spreading in a slow pool across the chamber floor, the faint twitch of muscles that hadn't gotten the message yet.
"Yeah," he said. "Let's not do it again."
Behind the corpse, the RMA node kept its blue glow going. Steady and unbothered. As if none of it had happened at all.