Day 10
By the time the tenth day arrived, the Swamp had turned into a ruined wasteland of blasted timber and bubbling acid.
It was Team A's final shift of the day. Kaelen stood at the very front of the line and kept his heavy iron shield raised. He stared through the thick smoke at the towering Miasma-Titan. The massive cathedral of rotting wood and petrified sludge had not moved from its crater since the very first day of the raid. It just sat there, constantly regenerating its bark every time the Adventurers blew a hole in its chest.
Vance sprinted and slid to a halt right next to his commander. The Thief hacked a dark cough into his sleeve before looking up.
"Boss," Vance panted as he wiped black sap from his cheek. "I checked the visual flow of its regeneration. The Titan's current Mana pool sits at roughly fifty-five percent."
Kaelen felt a cold, heavy knot form deep in his stomach.
Fifty-five percent.
They were severely behind schedule. The brutal math of the marathon was finally catching up to them.
After ten full days of continuous fighting, they had completed forty total shifts. If they were hitting the required quota of draining 1.67 percent of the monster's fuel during every single rotation, the Miasma-Titan's reserves should currently be sitting at thirty-three percent by now.
They had missed the mark by a big margin. Twenty-two percent.
In a long-term war of attrition, the human mind becomes a dangerous variable. When a commander explicitly removes a daily quota, the fighters naturally pace themselves. They avoid pushing their bodies to the absolute limit because they know they have to survive for fifteen agonizing days. They strike moderately, saving their stamina for the final day.
But this cautious pacing triggers a fatal consequence on the battlefield.
By holding back their destructive output, the Adventurers deal less immediate damage to the beast's outer shell. Because the damage is lighter, the Calamity does not need to draw massive amounts of energy to regenerate its torn flesh. The monster replaces its armor highly efficiently, burning only a tiny fraction of its internal fuel.
Prioritizing long-term human stamina over short-term damage quotas creates a paradox. The fighters stay healthy, but they accidentally give the Calamity-class Monster enough breathing room to conserve its own Mana. They prolong the war, pushing the finish line further away while the clock constantly ticks down.
A loud explosion rocked the swamp.
Kaelen watched a Swordsman hack his glowing blade into a thick root. The man swung hard, but he clearly held back his full swinging arc to conserve his shoulder muscles for the next hour. A Mage fired a fireball, but the flame lacked the blinding, condensed heat of a desperate strike.
They are fighting to survive the day, Kaelen thought, his teeth grinding together behind his iron visor. They are not fighting to kill it.
He stared up at the glowing yellow vents of the stationary giant.
Did I make the wrong choice? Kaelen agonized in his mind, his broadsword feeling unusually heavy in his grip. I refused to give them the quota because I was terrified of repeating the tragedy from ten years ago. I wanted to save them from burning out and dying early. But because I kept my mouth shut, we are bleeding time. If we don't break that shell by day fifteen, our stomachs will reject the potions, and this toxic fog will melt us all anyway.
He questioned his own leadership while watching the endless cycle of shattered wood and instant healing. The burden of command pressed down on his shoulders like a physical weight, leaving him entirely unsure if his mercy had just doomed the entire Principality of Voragale.
---
Day 12
It was Team A's shift. Thick clouds covered the moon. The dark sky offered nothing, so the Adventurers relied entirely on their trained eyes and sharp senses to track the swinging roots in the dark.
Then, the monster broke its pattern.
Deep inside its chest, a strange, wet grinding noise echoed in the entire field. The two glowing yellow vents on its upper body suddenly flared to a blinding, chaotic brightness.
Before the backline could even react, the Titan forcefully vented a massive, highly pressurized cloud of thick purple miasma. The toxic gas, made up of Monster's leaking Mana, exploded outward and instantly swallowed the entire battlefield. Visibility dropped to less than a single meter.
"Hold the line!" Kaelen roared, completely blinded by the purple smog. "Keep your guard up!"
The ground violently rumbled.
For ten days, the Titan had always attacked vertically from above, dropping its massive log arms straight down to crush the vanguard.
But tonight, hidden entirely inside the thick fog, the towering beast twisted its huge body. It pulled both of its two-meter-thick arms wide out to its sides.
Then, the giant swung.
With a deafening groan of twisting timber, the Titan swung both arms inward horizontally. It initiated a giant, devastating clap aimed directly at the center of the Adventurers' formation.
"I hear wind!" a Tanker screamed, his voice cracking in the dark.
The Adventurers gasped. The blinding purple miasma kept the approaching logs entirely hidden, so they just heard deep rumbles closing in. By the time the two massive black shadows finally broke through the fog wall, the rough bark was already rushing at them from the left and the right.
They noticed the attack entirely too late.
The frontline trembled. There was no time to step backward, and there was nowhere to run. The two massive logs closed the gap like a crushing vise, threatening to sandwich the entire formation into a spray of broken armor and crushed bone.
Kaelen raised his shield, his eyes wide with raw terror as the timber blocked out the world.
"Incoming!" Vance shouted.
Twelve Adventurers braced for impact.
---
Hundreds of meters from the death zone, the safe camp sat quietly in the dark woods.
Inside the large canvas tent, Team B was fast asleep. They did not post a night watch.
Twenty meters out from the tent flaps, the Mages had set a secure perimeter of magical tripwires. They also buried volatile trap magic in the ground, turning the soil into a hidden minefield.
If a stray crawler or a lost beast broke a single wire, the hidden trap would instantly explode to blow the monster into pieces.
A split second after the blast, a loud, high-pitched ringing would blast inside the tent to wake every fighter in a fraction of a second.
Because of this layered defense, the exhausted Adventurers could sleep deeply, so they avoided any fear of a sudden ambush in the dark.
But Chris was wide awake.
The Thief sat cross-legged on his bedroll but his mind was completely locked on the young prodigy sitting across the tent.
He had become increasingly weary of the two strange girls from the Feeble Soul, but Lumina bothered him the most.
A single lantern cast a weak orange glow over her face. Lumina sat on a wooden chair. Her back was perfectly straight. She stared blankly at the canvas wall.
Chris felt a cold sweat prickle the back of his neck.
Everyone else in this tent is destroyed, Chris analyzes silently, his breathing turning shallow. The Tankers are snoring loudly because their muscles are torn. Boss Thorne looks like a walking corpse. I can barely keep my own eyes open. But her posture is completely fine. Her facial expression hasn't changed since day one. She doesn't look tired, she doesn't look scared, and she isn't sweating as much as we do.
Chris rubbed his arms, a sudden wave of goosebumps rising on his skin.
Lumina turned off the lantern and lay down on her bed. Darkness filled the entire tent.
It's unnatural, Chris thought, swallowing hard. No human being can fight a Calamity for eleven days and look this perfectly fine. What is she?
In the middle of his paranoid thoughts, a sound broke the quiet night.
Thud. Thud. Thud.
Sudden footsteps broke the silence. Heavy boots pounded fiercely against the dry soil outside the canvas, and the rhythm sounded completely erratic and panicked.
"Help! Help!" a voice shrieked through the trees.
The magical alarm did not trigger because the runner was a human, not a monster.
Twelve Adventurers violently snapped awake. They threw their blankets aside, grabbing their swords and staves in high alert as they scrambled to their feet.
Only Celia remained entirely asleep, buried deep under her warm wool blanket. Lumina stood up slowly.
Someone quickly grabbed the dial on a lantern and turned the flame up to cast a bright light toward the entrance.
A frantic figure violently stumbled through the open entryway of the tent.
A Healer from Team A collapsed through the fabric. She hit the floor hard. Blood poured down the side of her face from a huge gash on her forehead, soaking the collar of her white robes. She was gasping for air, her chest heaving as she dragged herself up to lean her broken body against the wooden entrance pole.
The waking Adventurers froze in pure shock. A Tanker's mouth hanging open. A Mage covered her mouth with trembling hands.
Thorne rushed forward and dropped to his knees right beside the bleeding woman.
"What happened?" Thorne demanded, his voice shaking with dread.
The injured Healer looked up at the veteran Mage. Her eyes were completely hollow, wide with a trauma that words could barely contain.
"Team A has been wiped out!"