FWOOSHH!!!
Not with the dramatic pressure of something extraordinary. Just the familiar parting of space that Marcus had come to recognize, the particular quality of air moving aside for something that had no business being contained by it in the first place.
Malachar stepped through.
The starless black armor with the crimson bleeding through the seams, the sealed visor, the sword in his gauntleted fist still carrying the particular weight of something that had ended kingdoms and remembered all of them. He landed in the chamber and straightened and the room absorbed his presence the way rooms absorbed his presence, by getting slightly smaller.
He looked at the two golems.
They looked at him.
"Adequate warm up," he said.
He moved.
The first golem raised both arms in the coordinated attack pattern that had broken Liz's sword and sent her into the wall. Malachar walked through the arc like it wasn't happening, stepped inside the reach, and drove his sword through the golem's chest at the exact point where the red light was densest. The crack that followed wasn't the sound of stone breaking.
It was the sound of whatever was animating the stone being told it was finished. The golem dropped in pieces, the red light bleeding out of the cracks as it fell, and Malachar was already turning before the last piece hit the floor.
The second golem charged.
Malachar caught it by the face with one gauntleted hand, stopped it completely, and looked at it for one moment with the expression of something that found the whole situation mildly beneath its attention.
Then he drove it into the chamber floor.
The impact cracked the stone in a radius of four feet. The golem did not get back up. The red light in its surface went dark and it stayed dark.
Two golems. Seven seconds.
Liz stared from the rubble with her broken sword still in her hand.
"Okay," she said quietly. "Okay."
The Hollow Keeper had watched all of it with the same mild disinterest it had shown Liz's fight. But something had shifted now. Not concern.
Reassessment. The particular quality of something that had been conducting an evaluation and had received a result that required updating its parameters.
It looked at Malachar.
"A Drauven's call," it said. The theatrical quality was gone from its voice. What replaced it was something older and more direct. "I have not seen one in a while ." Its gaze moved to Marcus. "You are further along than I expected."
"Finish your assessment later," Marcus said. "We're done here."
The Hollow Keeper looked at him for a moment.
Then it smiled. Or did the thing its face did that was the closest it came to smiling.
"Not yet," it said.
Both hands came together and the darkness between its palms compressed, dense and total, pulling the available light in the chamber toward it the way a drain pulled water, the red veins in the walls dimming as the energy between the Hollow Keeper's hands grew heavier and darker and more concentrated.
Malachar turned toward it.
The Hollow Keeper released it.
The Hollow Keeper raised both hands and the darkness between its palms compressed into something specific and deliberate.
[HOLLOW KEEPER SKILL ACTIVATED]
[VOID SEVERANCE]
[Effect: Severs the connection between a summoner and their active summon. Converts summon energy into raw void matter. Irreversible within current encounter.]
Marcus read it as it appeared slightly displayed by the system and felt something cold move through his chest that had nothing to do with the temperature.
A skill to negate summoning?
The void burst hit Malachar in the center of his chest and the sound it made was not an explosion. It was an absence. A hole in the sound of the chamber, a moment where everything that should have made noise simply didn't, and in that silence Malachar came apart.
Not the quiet dissolution of a normal dismissal. Not the armor losing its edges softly. The black plating deconstructed from the outside in, piece by piece, the crimson bleeding out of each section as it went, the sword last, and then the space where he had been was just space and the chamber was just a chamber and the only evidence he had ever been there was the two destroyed golems on the floor and the crack his arrival had left in the stone.
Liz watched Malachar dissolve piece by piece from the rubble, her broken sword still in her hand, and the last thing she said before her eyes closed and her head dropped was:
"Don't you dare lose."
Marcus stood in the center of the chamber and looked at where Malachar had been."This might jxt get annoying."
The Hollow Keeper lowered its hands slowly.
"Impressive," it said, and it sounded genuine. "The armor held longer than most." It looked at Marcus with the full weight of its ancient attention. "But the summon is gone. The girl is down. And you are standing in my chamber alone with a blade and whatever's left in your arsenal." A pause. "It is over."
Marcus surveyed the chamber and sighed loudly.
Just the two of them now.
"Now we're both alone," he said, rolling his neck once. "Let's see how you fare physically."
The Hollow Keeper tilted its head. "Me alone?"
Marcus was already moving.
He crossed the distance fast, SPD doing the work, throwing combinations that had no business landing on something that old and they almost did, forcing the Hollow Keeper backward two steps before it adjusted and began weaving between the strikes with a fluidity that had no right existing in something that size.
Marcus pulled back.
He's this fast as a mage, he thought. Unreal.
He checked his MP instinctively.
[MP: 50/100]
Fifty. Enough for Malachar. But the Void Severance skill was still active. Summoning meant watching him get destroyed again immediately.
"All out of options?" The Hollow Keeper smiled.
"You've pushed me further than most."
Both hands came up.
[UNDEAD SUMMON: ACTIVATED]
Two knights tore through the chamber floor, dark armor, empty visors, already moving toward
Marcus before they'd fully formed.
He dodged left.
Dodged right.
Then something cold pressed against his ribs from behind.
A black spear. Hovering. Perfectly still.
When did—
******