There was no need for orders. In one coordinated moment, the guards raised their shields together, as if they were a moving wall of steel. And the Commander's sword was no longer just a piece of metal now. It had transformed into something else, something alive and dangerous. It had become a fiery whip, a glowing rope of inclined flame, sparks flying from it like small bolts of condensed fire. Then it seemed to divide or grow two more ropes from it. It was no longer a sword in the traditional sense, but had become a tool of punishment from another world, something used for flogging, with one sole difference: the ropes were fiery, explosive, and ended life instead of torturing it.

  The Commander gave one order, concise and decisive. He looked at the silver-helmed guard, where her prominent eyes from the narrow slit met his gaze. "Help them." She meant the guards fighting the swarms of small curses from the sides. "While I fight this curse."

  And he launched.

  He began moving his hand in a circular motion, and the three fiery ropes began spinning around him, creating a burning hissing sound that cut the air. Then he struck. Not one strike, but three coordinated strikes in the same moment. A rope to the right, a rope to the left, and a third rope straight ahead, to the center of the monster. The attacks came from three different directions, trying to paralyze its movement or tear it apart.

  But the waxy monster was not to be tricked so easily. From its hands, the black viscous substance flowed and formed two long swords, black and glossy, their edges glowing with an angry crimson color. And the tail-tentacle protruding from its right shoulder began to change as well; its end took on a sharp, elongated shape, transforming into a third sword writhing in the air like a black snake. With quick and precise blows, the monster parried the three fiery ropes. Each collision released bursts of black and red sparks, and the smell of burnt ozone and scorched waxy flesh.

  And the Commander launched into movement. He was not standing still. His feet moved in short, quick steps, his body spinning, and his arm holding the "whip-sword" hilt moved with terrifying speed. The three fiery ropes became like angry snakes, attacking from every direction: from above, from below, from behind in sudden attempts. They tried to wrap around his defenses, burning the air where they passed.

  Meanwhile, on the side fronts, the guards were fighting with great courage and clear skill. They were not just ordinary soldiers; they were professionals. Their armor was refined, and their strikes precise. Each sword strike targeted a weak point in the curse's anatomy: joints, eyes if they existed, the soft areas between the imaginary chitinous plates. The curses were dying, one after another, with splattering black fluids and sharp screams that quickly faded.

  And the guard... her speed was something astounding. It wasn't just enhanced human speed. It was as if she were a sports car moving at top speed in a narrow alley. Disappearance and appearance. She moved with short, explosive steps, each step propelling her several meters. In her grip - she did not carry a visible weapon - she was killing the curses with direct strikes. She needed no more than a touch. The invisible aura of force around her grip was crushing the small curses' skulls, tearing their bodies apart, and throwing them away like broken dolls. It was only a matter of time before cleaning up the sides and joining the Commander in the central battle.

  But of course, the numbers were large. And quantity would prevail in the end.

  One of the curses, of the fast-moving crawling type, slipped away from a guard's sword and pounced from a blind spot. Its sharp claws, which resembled black knives, pierced the guard's back between his armor and shoulder. The stab was deep and fatal. The guard screamed and began falling to his knees. He would die within minutes, if not seconds.

  But here my plan was simple. San thought as he watched from a relatively safe distance with Shin and Elena. I can keep the fatal wounds away from them. I can rewind time for a part of their bodies, for just two seconds, to move them away from the path of the stab.

  So, at the same moment, when he saw the claws sinking into the back, San used his technique. He focused on the back, on the muscles and skin in the moment before the penetration. He felt that familiar pull, as if part of his soul was being pulled through time.

  And the scene changed slightly. The guard who was falling suddenly found himself bending forward, the claws that had pierced his back now only touching the surface of the shield, leaving scratches but no penetration. He was confused, but he immediately returned to fighting, battling the curse that had almost killed him.

  I want to prolong the fight by any means, San thought. Every extra minute gives the guard time to clean the sides and gives the Commander a chance to find a gap.

  Then one of the flying curses shot towards them - the three of us on the periphery. It was expected.

  But before it could get close, it was hit by a shock. A powerful air wave, almost visible as a ripple in the air, struck it in the middle of its body. It was Shin's blow. The wave didn't kill it, but it paralyzed its movement in the air, making it wobble unsteadily.

  And in that moment of suspension, needles pierced it. Not metal needles, but small, dark red needles, hard as iron, launched forcefully from Elena's direction. They were blood needles. They pierced the imaginary eyes of the flying curse, then other sensitive areas. The curse fell to the ground and did not move.

  This was the simple plan I had given to Elena and Shin: Protect the three of us. Do not interfere in the central fight unless you have to. Stay here, where you can observe everything,

  And everything was moving well. Even better than good. The monster was under constant pressure from the Commander's consecutive attacks, and the numbers of side curses were steadily decreasing thanks to the guard and the guards.

  Until that moment.

  From the midst of that epic of flame, steel, and rapid movement, from the heart of the struggle between the Commander and the monster, an arrow shot out.

  It was not an ordinary arrow. It was black, glossy, made of the same waxy substance. Its length easily exceeded a meter. And its speed was terrifying. It shot out like black lightning.

  In less than a second, the arrow pierced the head of one of the guards who was busy fighting two curses. It entered from the forehead and exited from the back of the head, carrying with it fragments of brain and bone. The guard fell dead before he realized what had happened.

  San quickly looked at the monster. The tail-tentacle protruding from its left shoulder had changed shape again. Its end had taken the shape of a complex, curved bow, made of the black substance. While the Commander was pressing him fiercely, the monster was planning and striking at the same time. He was killing them one by one.

  Then he fired another arrow.

  But this arrow did not reach its target. It was destroyed mid-way.

  It was the guard. San did not know what her feelings were under that closed silver helmet. But the aura emanating from her... said it all. It was now glowing more powerfully, like an angry energy field. When she jumped to intercept the second arrow, she did not use a weapon. Simply, she struck it with her grip. The aura around her grip collided with the black arrow, and the arrow turned into a spray of scattering black substance before it even touched her glove.

  But this intervention had a price.

  Her focus on intercepting the arrows made her focus on protecting the guards from the side curses less sharp. And the curses were merciless.

  A moment of distraction. A crawling curse jumped and sank its claws into a guard's neck. Another tried to parry an attack from the side but a flying curse pounced on his extended arm and almost severed it. Guard after guard began to fall. Not always instant death, but with serious injuries that took them out of the fight.

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  The number of fallen guards became three... then four...

  When another young soldier was subjected to a swift attack, where a curse headed straight for his eye in a pointed shape, San used his technique again. He focused on the soldier's eye, on the iris, on the moment before its penetration. He rewound time for two seconds and the fatal eye wound disappeared, , . He survived immediate death.

  But while the Commander was pressing the monster with all his might, with his fiery blows that left deep scratches and melted parts of it, the monster was still parrying most of the attacks. And he was adapting. He was learning the patterns of the Commander's attacks.

  And what happened next was the worst.

  When the Commander tried a new trick, where he struck from below in two intersecting directions trying to lift the monster off the ground, the monster jumped high. And what this jump revealed was horrific.

  He did not have only two tails from the shoulders. There was a third tail, thicker and shorter, protruding from below his back, near the coccyx. And this tail was not free in the air. It was buried in the ground.

  Was he collecting the black substance from the ground with it? From the corpses? From something.

  And the third tail came out of the ground, and at its end, there was a ball. A large ball, its diameter exceeding a meter, made of condensed black substance. And the surface of the ball was not smooth; dozens of small black spears were protruding from it,

  With a terrifyingly powerful motion, the monster ripped the large ball from its tail and threw it high into the sky. And at the same time, it turned its third tail itself, to bend and form another bow.

  And fired two arrows from that new bow,

  Two huge black arrows, heading at a speed surpassing the previous ones.

  And the ground under the guard's feet cracked. , due to the immense force she was applying to the ground during her rapid running. Stones cracked and flew. She was very fast. She parried the first arrow with a blow from her grip, turning it to dust. And from the stones flying under her foot, she kicked one with a precise sideways motion, and sent it on a path that intercepted the second arrow, pushing it far off its course .

  But the pressure on her doubled. She was now in an unenviable situation. The monster was attacking her with more arrows, , and the guards were falling around her.

  And the situation was about to get worse.

  San was looking at the sky.

  The large ball the monster had thrown... was dividing. In mid-air, it exploded into tens, even hundreds, of medium-sized spears, each about an arm's length, sharp, black, and now falling. They were not heading towards a specific place only, but were spreading like a spray of death over a wide area of the courtyard. Heading towards them, towards the guards, towards everywhere.

  They were falling very fast, like deadly black rain.

  Shin, who was closer to them, hurried. "Get close!" he shouted, and raised his hand quickly. The air wave he released this time was wider, less focused, but stronger. An impulsive shock wave launched after the spears had approached within a few meters of them , . The air wave collided with the falling spears, deflected them, broke some, and pushed the rest away.

  Shin had saved them. But this was possible for a simple reason: there were no curses attacking them directly at that moment. Their focus was on the spears only.

  As for the guards, who were surrounded by curses from every side, they did not have this luxury. Any slack in defending themselves from the living curses would mean a fatal injury. And any attempt to deflect the falling spears would expose them to the curses' attack.

  So, when the spears fell, the scene was horrific.

  Whoosh-whoosh-whoosh-whoosh-thud-thud-crrrrrrsh!

  Sounds of bodies, chests, armor being penetrated. The dust raised by the spears upon hitting the ground. Screams of pain, shouts, then the sudden silence of some.

  Six guards were killed in this attack. Six men who had been fighting valiantly moments ago, now lay fallen, pierced by several black spears, stretched out on the dirty ground.

  San looked at his technique. The internal countdown said he needed four more seconds to activate it again. Time was passing very slowly for his internal calculations, but events were accelerating very quickly in the external world. He was paralyzed. He couldn't save any of them. He didn't even know who to save first.

  And after his technique became usable again, the situation had changed. There were guards sitting on the ground, moaning in pain, holding bleeding wounds, knowing death was coming. And San looked at them, and at the distance between them, and at his limited technique that targeted only one thing at a time, and felt a furious helplessness fill him. He couldn't do anything for them. Nothing.

  The Commander shouted, a shout filled with angry frustration. "No use! Help me against him! We must prevent him from repeating this!"

  The guard realized it too. Cleaning the sides was no longer an option. If that collective attack repeated, everyone would end.

  So she headed at her top speed towards the central battle.

  And the monster turned its tails. The left tail from the shoulder turned into a long spear. And the rear third tail turned into another spear. He was preparing himself to face both opponents together.

  The Commander's attack became more ferocious, more desperate. The fiery ropes struck faster, trying to wrap around, burn, tear apart. And the guard began direct collision with the monster's spears. She was using only one hand - the right hand - for attack and parry. Her left hand was busy as if gathering something . Her focus was divided.

  And the result was that her physical armor - - began to show

  deep scratches.

  .

  And after moments of this confrontation

  She lunged terrifyingly towards the monster. She had been using her right grip all along. But now, at the last moment, when the two spears were heading towards her heart, she used the other grip. The left hand,

  , something happened. The aura around her left grip... was larger . It wasn't just a thin sheath. It became like a ball of condensed energy, almost visible as a glow surrounding her closed grip.

  When the monster attacked her directly with its two spears, as if trying to penetrate her with a decisive blow, the enlarged aura collided with the two spears.

  Crrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrsh!

  The aura did not break. The spears broke. They shattered from their middle, and their ends turned into scattering black debris.

  And the guard's movement did not stop. Her lunge continued. And her left grip, surrounded by that aura of destructive energy, struck the monster's chest.

  The sound was like lightning striking a mountain of wax. The monster was thrown back like a doll, flying through the air for twenty meters before crashing into one of the academy's shattered walls with a terrible crashing sound. A portion of the wall disappeared under the impact.

  The monster rose from the dust and debris.

  But... it was different.

  It had no left shoulder. There was no left arm. It had completely disappeared, torn from the root by the force of the blow. Its place was a circular crater in its waxy body, oozing black viscous substance like blood.

  .

  It began to regenerate.

  From the edges of the wound, the black substance began to flow, expand, and form anew. A new shoulder, primitive in shape, began to appear. Then an arm.

  What? This is nonsense! San thought, his heart contracting with despair. Just die! Why won't you die?!

  When the monster returned to attack again, it was more ferocious, more focused. It had gotten used to the Commander's attacks. It had evaded the two fiery ropes , and was leaving the third to receive its blow . And it was directing all its strikes, all its spears, all its concentration, towards the guard. It saw her as the greatest threat now.

  And the regeneration of its shoulder and arm was almost complete.

  Then San realized the plan. The plan the curse had devised in the midst of all this chaos, while everyone was busy surviving.

  The plan was simple and direct: It would receive an attack. Not a fatal one, but an attack that caused significant injury. It would be wounded, weakened. And it would use its regeneration energy - , - to heal itself

  Five coordinated attacks from the monster headed towards the guard. Two spears from the upper tails, a spear from the rear tail, and two swift strikes from the swords in its hands. A deadly network of attacks, impossible to parry all of them.

  This is bad, San thought. Very bad. And if the guard fell, the Commander would end shortly after. And we would all die.

  And without any hesitation, without a second thought, he raised his hand as fast as possible towards the monster, and used his technique.

  But he didn't focus on the guard this time. Nor on a specific attack.

  He focused on the monster itself. On a specific part of it.

  He remembered everything the monster had thought, all its successive intelligent plans: from trapping herds of curses in the buildings to use as a trap, from the rituals to increase its power, from reducing the number of guards with arrows and the collective attack, and from this last attack against the guard. Every step was calculated. Every step ensured the success of the next step.

  It would win. And we would all die.

  But there was one thing the monster hadn't thought of. One thing that wasn't in its calculations.

  It was my technique.

  It was simple, small, time-limited. But it existed.

  And at the moment the decisive collision between it and the guard approached, at the moment when the spears were centimeters from her armor and aura, the change occurred.

  There was no spear coming out of its left shoulder.

  Its left shoulder had disappeared.

  And its left arm, which had been holding the sword, fell heavily to the ground, like a severed piece of wax.

  For a moment... just for a moment... the monster froze.

  It didn't understand. Its black eyes that expressed nothing, seemed to stare into the void where its shoulder had been a fraction of a second ago. San had rewound it two seconds. To the moment before the completion of its shoulder and arm regeneration after the guard's devastating blow. He had returned it to its injured, weak, incomplete state.

  A fraction of a second of confusion. A fraction of a second of immobility.

  And that was all the guard and the Commander needed.

  The Commander's fiery rope, which had been circling in the back , struck the monster's back. It wasn't aiming for the head or the heart, but the spine, the place where the third rear tail connected. The rope wrapped around the tail, and pulled it forcefully, causing a large tear at the base of the back and preventing it from using the tail by wrapping the rope around it

  And at the same moment, the guard was striking. Very, very fast. They weren't ordinary punches. They were blows as strong as hammers, as fast as bullets. The monster's face, still frozen in confusion, turned into chaos of scattering black substance under the onslaught of the blows. Its black eyes disappeared, its cracked mouth shattered.

  And at the moment it tried to attack with the remaining sword in its right hand and the spear from its right shoulder, the Commander's other two fiery ropes wrapped around them. One wrapped around the sword and arm, the other wrapped around the spear and shoulder, and pulled them back, completely immobilizing its movement.

  And the guard continued to strike its face. And now the ground under her feet was being destroyed from the intensity of the force she was striking with, forming a small crater.

  And after less than three seconds from the start of this devastating joint attack... the monster stopped moving.

  The guard moved away from it quickly.

  It was a horrific sight.

  Its head... was no longer there. The entire upper half of its head had disappeared. Its chest, on the side where its heart should be - if it had a heart - was a large gap. It had all disappeared. And its left shoulder and arm, which San had returned to a state of non-existence, were no longer regenerating. Regeneration in them had completely stopped.

  And the thing that certainly meant it, happened.

  The body of the tall waxy monster began to vibrate. Then it began to evaporate. Not like smoke, but as if the substance itself was disintegrating into fine black particles fluttering in the air and then disappearing. It started from the extremities: the upper tails melted, then the legs, then the torso. It was disappearing, turning into nothing, leaving only a sharp chemical smell in the air and evaporated black droplets on the ground.

  This monster had been killed.

  Finally... this nightmare had ended.

  ....