The sheer consumption of his mana pool forced Markus to adjust his strategy. He could not afford to be the sole anchor if he wished to remain at peak capacity for the Lich-Warden.
Recognizing the silent strain in his posture, the predatory entity coiled beneath his uniform shifted, ready to execute his unspoken command.
"Go, Nagini," Markus thought, his voice echoing in their private mental link. "Keep the pressure off them, but do not clear the board. Let them bleed enough to learn."
With a sound like silk sliding over glass, a massive shadow detached itself from Markus's silhouette. Nagini materialized in the dim, bioluminescent light of the crypt, her scales a deep, abyssal black that seemed to drink the pale moss-glow. Her crimson eyes flared with malicious delight as she surged past the frontline.
Nagini did not simply bite; she moved like a sliding scale of pure destruction. Her massive tail slammed into a cluster of advancing Tier 4 Skeleton Warriors, the sheer kinetic force shattering their necrotic-iron bones into a hail of grey shrapnel.
With Nagini acting as a lethal buffer, the pressure on the team eased just enough for them to recalibrate their formation.
The dungeon, however, responded to the intrusion. The recursive hallways groaned, and the clicking of bone intensified as the common grunts were reinforced by specialized tiers of the dead. From the elevated ledges and deep shadows of the crypt, new threats emerged.
Skeleton Archers, their bows were strung with tendons of corrupted mana, letting fly a barrage of black-feathered arrows that whistled through the air toward the center of the formation.
Skeleton Mages, robed in tattered, moldering shrouds, they chanted in a dead language, their skeletal hands crackling with negative-energy spells and localized gravity traps designed to disrupt the team's positioning.
Skeleton Knights, standing a head taller than the warriors, these monstrous husks wielded heavy greatswords and rode the skeletal remains of armored mounts, their sheer weight class threatening to breach the shield wall.
Seeing the sudden escalation, Rosanne Vance knew she could no longer hold back. Grasping her primary armament—a beautifully crafted, mana-conductive staff topped with a crystalline sun-core—she slammed the base of the weapon into the obsidian floor.
"By the light of the foundation, stand firm!" Rosanne shouted, her voice cutting through the necrotic din.
A shockwave of pure, golden energy erupted from her staff, enveloping the entire team.
Mika, Jessica, and Donna felt an immediate surge of power as Rosanne's light-elemental magic amplified their strength, agility, and mana-recovery rates, temporarily closing the gap between their Tier 3 standing and the Tier 4 environment.
Flipping her staff with practiced grace, Rosanne channeled her remaining offensive reserves into the crystal apex.
As dozens of blinding Light Arrows materialized in a halo around her. With a sweeping gesture, she sent them raining down upon the skeleton mages and archers.
Because the undead were inherently weak to light damage, the arrows struck with devastating, critical precision. Skeletons caught in the radiant barrage didn't just break—they dissolved into ash, their necrotic cores burning away in flashes of brilliant white light.
From the rear, Markus watched the battlefield unfold, analyzing the synergy between Rosanne's buffs and Nagini's disruption.
The cost of his earlier time-manipulation still weighed on his reserves, but his mind remained sharp, calculating the exact trajectory of the Skeleton Knights as they charged Donna's reinforced shield line.
At the apex of the recursive labyrinth, the narrow, winding corridors of the crypt suddenly gave way to a massive, circular chamber of blackened granite. This was the threshold of the dungeon's heart.
Guarding the massive, rune-carved doors of the boss chamber stood four Skeletal Horsemen—monstrous, Tier 4 elite guardians clad in heavy, necrotic iron armor and mounted atop skeletal steeds that exhaled a freezing blue miasma.
These were not mere grunts; they were a coordinated vanguard possessing a crushing physical presence that threatened to shatter the team's momentum before they could even face the Warden.
The moment the group crossed the threshold, the horsemen leveled their massive lances and charged, the rhythmic pounding of their hooves echoing like thunder in the enclosed space.
The sheer kinetic momentum of the charge threatened to bypass Donna and Mika's front line entirely, the freezing miasma draining the ambient mana from the air.
Recognizing that the girls could not withstand a direct impact from four combined Tier 4 cavalry units, Markus decided it was time to step in.
Without the heavy mana drain of his temporal abilities, Markus unleashed his primary mastery over three-dimensional space. Moving with an effortless, fluid grace, he stepped to the front of the formation, mapping the exact trajectory of the charging horsemen.
With a simple, deliberate gesture of his hand, he executed a series of high-tier Spatial Folds.
Markus warped the space directly in front of the leading two horsemen. Instead of striking the team's shield wall, their lances passed through a localized spatial tear, plunging into the flanks of their own companions.
He stabilized the center of the room by increasing the spatial pressure over the remaining riders, pinning their skeletal steeds to the stone floor and leaving them completely immobilized.
By manipulating the geometry of the battlefield, Markus did not steal the kills; instead, he perfectly partitioned the elite guardians, breaking their unified charge into isolated, vulnerable targets for the girls to execute.
As the first horseman thrashed against the invisible weight of the compressed space, Markus maintained his cold, absolute focus, his mana pool safely anchored without the ruinous cost of his Time magic.
Markus deliberately withheld his ultimate spatial ability, Dark Singularity. While the technique possessed the absolute destructive capacity to collapse the entire vanguard into an infinitesimal point of non-existence, its gravitational pull was entirely indiscriminate. In a chamber of this size, the micro-black hole would not merely consume the Skeletal Horsemen; it would tear through the local ley lines, destabilizing the space beneath his teammates' feet and pulling them into the crushing vacuum of its event horizon.
For Markus, deploying such unrefined devastation while leading a unit was a failure of calculation—a sloppy reliance on raw power over geometric precision.
As the final Skeletal Horseman crumbled into a heap of glowing ash under the girls' coordinated assault, Markus lowered his hand, the dark, twisting gravity that had briefly flickered around his fingertips fading back into his core.