Chapter 438: Breaking Point II
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Sekhmet saw the anger in her eyes and smiled without warmth.
She did not like that.
The twins had forced the dark-clothed man deeper into the chamber by then. Vera cut one line. Vela cut another. He blocked, moved, turned, and struck back with that narrow black blade of his, but even he could not fully regain the balance of the fight. The twins were too fast and too used to one another. Vera lost a lock of silver hair to his blade. Vela took a shallow cut across one sleeve. In return, he gained a line across the cheek and another across the left side of his ribs where Vera’s blade slipped through by half a finger more than he wanted.
His eyes changed after that.
Not panic.
A harder thing.
Respect sharpened by danger.
Then he released more of his power.
The pressure around him deepened so suddenly that one wounded lower-market fighter near the wall almost choked on his own breath. Chaos energy rolled off him more cleanly than before. Not theatrical, not wasteful, but undeniable.
Fourth Rank, yes.
And now climbing.
The twins felt it too, because both of them changed with him. Their own pressure rose sharper. Not wider. Sharper. Their movements became cleaner, harder, more exact. The chamber around them suddenly looked too small for what they were doing inside it.
Raka’s side was no cleaner.
With Sekhmet and the twins holding the two real killers away, his men finally had room to make Dickoff bleed. One hired man went down screaming when two lesser bloodline fighters dragged him off his feet and tore his throat open. An Iron House guard caught claws across the eyes and stumbled blindly into a spear from his own side. Raka himself reached Dickoff once, really reached him, and his blood-shaped claws tore through the bastard’s shoulder guard and opened flesh beneath.
Dickoff screamed.
That sound pleased almost everyone on Raka’s side.
Not enough to save them.
Because Iron House still had numbers. Not better numbers. Fresh enough ones. Men who had not yet bled their strength away against the original assault. The guards reformed around Dickoff again. Hired killers pushed in from the right. One of Raka’s stronger men went down with three blades in him. Another lost an arm and kept fighting with the other until a hammer strike crushed his face.
The battle swung and swung again.
Then Dickoff saw his chance.
It came small. That was why no one noticed it fast enough. One of Raka’s men leaped at him from the front. Dickoff’s last loyal guard took the attack in the throat and died buying half a breath. At the same time, two Iron House men crashed into the side of the melee between Raka and the hired killers. Bodies turned. Blood moved. The knot of fighting twisted left.
Dickoff ran.
Not backward in open sight. Not dramatically. He slipped through the side lane behind a fallen crate line, shoved one of his own wounded men out of the way, and disappeared into a storage cut leading deeper toward the older tunnel routes. No one saw it clearly. Not Raka, because he was killing. Not the hired men, because they were too busy staying alive. Not even the wounded lesser creatures on the floor, because they had other things to care about.
Sekhmet would have seen it if he had been looking there.
He was not.
The armored woman forced all of his attention.
She had stopped holding herself back too.
The cut across her thigh, the pressure of his blood control, and the steady realization that she could not put him down quickly had stripped the careful lid off her power. Her chaos energy surged higher. The force of it hit the chamber like a wave breaking inside stone. Several lesser fighters on both sides staggered. Two lamps shattered. Dust fell from the ceiling.
Chaos Rank Five.
Not stable yet.
But there.
She had crossed the line in battle.
Her eyes sharpened with savage satisfaction as she felt it. "You pushed me."
Sekhmet answered by trying to tear her throat out.
His claws came in blood-coated arcs, not pretty, not delicate, but heavy enough now that her blade could not simply brush them away. She blocked one, took the second on her arm, and the third struck her armor hard enough to throw sparks from the impact point.
Behind him, the dark-clothed man changed at nearly the same moment.
The twins felt it before they fully saw it. The pressure around him rose, cleaned itself, and locked into something heavier. His black blade cut wider. His body moved with less waste than before. He had been close already. Now battle pushed him to the final step.
Chaos Rank Five.
That made the whole chamber worse.
The twins did not retreat.
If anything, their own hunger sharpened under the pressure. Vera smiled first, the wrong kind of smile, the one she wore when beauty and violence finally stopped pretending they were separate things. Vela’s face did not change much, but her eyes did. They grew colder.
The dark-clothed man looked at them both and said, "Now it becomes worth it."
Then they attacked again.
The chamber could not properly hold the level of violence moving through it anymore. Pillars cracked. Blood jumped on the floor under pulses of force. The air itself felt wrong, too full, too sharp, too crowded with killing intent. Raka’s men fought lower down in the mess of bodies and market stone, but every time Sekhmet or the woman struck, every time the dark-clothed man met the twins’ blades, the whole underground section seemed to twitch around them.
Raka felt the change and cursed.
That was bad.
Very bad.
Because if both enemy leaders had broken through in the middle of battle, then the small advantage Dawn’s side had gained might die right there with the rest of his line.
Still he fought.
What else was there to do?
One of his remaining men screamed his name from somewhere to the left and then stopped making noise at all. Another lesser bloodline creature went down under a guard spear and did not rise. A third dragged himself forward with a broken leg just to bite into an Iron House fighter’s calf before both of them died under other boots.
Raka cut a hired man open from jaw to chest and spun, looking for Dickoff.
Gone.
That bastard was gone.
For one second, Raka thought he had been thrown to the floor or dragged under bodies. Then he understood the truth.
Dickoff had run.
Raka bared his teeth, but there was no time to chase him. The battle had already grown beyond that. He had a chamber full of dying men, a missing target, and two newly risen Fifth Rank enemies trying to turn the underground market into a grave.
Across the chamber, Sekhmet felt the woman’s rise and did not care.
"Good. Let her rise."
It only meant he would kill something stronger.
But even he understood what the shift meant for the rest of the field. The twins were now dealing with a Fifth Rank blade-user. Raka’s side was bleeding too fast. Dickoff was missing. The chamber had lost all clean shape.
The woman came again, faster now, and her blade carved a deep line across his side before he could fully turn with it. Blood spilled hot. He answered with both hands at once, shaping blood into twin jagged spikes that drove toward her chest and shoulder. She avoided the chest. The shoulder took the hit. It was not deep. But it was enough to matter.
She smiled through it.
Sekhmet did not.
Because now the battle had entered the worst kind of state.
It was no longer about winning cleanly.
About who would still be standing when the stone finally stopped shaking under them.