Damien's stomach dropped.
He turned to Valen with enough force to leave scratch marks on the worn out floor.
"That's—"
"Yeah," Valen muttered, eyes darting toward the centre of the room. "I noticed."
Before either could speak again, Nostradi made his move. Like smoke finding the smallest hole in a windowless room, he slipped through the crumbling fractures in the collapsing wall. His figure darted in and out of shadow, coat snapping behind him.
The growing roar in front of them screamed louder. Despite every inch of his body wanting to go after that man, Damien knew that survival was the priority here. For both him and the Sainted.
They chased him for a few paces regardless—until the roar ahead became a bellow that seemed to split their ribs. Both stopped and looked at each other.
"Yeah, no," Damien said, turning back toward the seal. "We've got bigger problems."
The fissure rippled, barely holding the monstrous thing on the other side.
Valen tightened his gloves. "You got any more of those… I dunno, 'surprise moves' you've been keeping from me? Now would be a good time."
Damien raised an eyebrow. "You mean my ancient, secret, absolutely legendary move?"
Valen brightened. "Yes!"
"Right, I've got one."
"Really?"
"Yeah, it's called 'Run!'"
As if in response to their movement, the fissure finally surrendered with a noise like breaking bone, and the Dragon's Maw burst free.
It was worse up close—too much muscle where there shouldn't be, too much nothing where there should be flesh. Loose strips of skin hung and tore in its movement, slapping wetly against the floor. Its claws, curved like a butcher's blade, gouging deep trenches into the stone floor.
With a single swipe of its claws, half the chamber vanished in a storm of rubble and dust.
The roar that followed was less a sound than a physical force—an unravelling scream that felt like it pulled the air out of the very vacuum it travelled through.
It was an admirable display of strength from a truly divine creature from the guts of hell.
The crumbling flesh caught his eye—drying, shedding in grey flakes. Not decay, not age. Tests. Someone had been carving this thing apart long before tonight.
"Valen!" Damien shouted, forcing his voice through the din. "We can't do anything about it here"
Valen stumbled over the remains of a bench. "Do you have a plan?"
"Yeah—don't die and head to the way we came from."
Damien darted sideways, making sure the thing saw him. It did. Those molten-gold eyes locked onto him with the raw focus of a starving predator.
He took a sharp turn toward the narrow exit, barely escaping another swing of the Maw's claws. It lunged after him, scraping slabs of stone loose as it forced its weight through the wreckage.
Valen cursed, making Damien briefly question the irony of it, but they kept pace. Behind them, the sound of the monster's pursuit filled the corridor in a rumble of sound and destruction.
Every step shook the floor beneath them. Every wall felt too thin.
In the passageway, its scales blazed crimson under the shattered torchlight, each plate glimmering like molten ore. When it barreled forward, the narrow path became nothing but splintering stone and curling heat, the air snapping with pressure as the beast's growl made the world tremble.
"Run faster!" Valen's voice cut through the chaos, sharper than steel.
The Dragon's claws shredded the floor behind them. The sound of tearing rock was deafening.
Damien threw himself forward just as the passage collapsed in a thunderclap of stone and dust, shoving Valen toward the arched exit. They tumbled through — and the world behind them came down in a storm of debris
For a heartbeat, silence. Damien's chest heaved. He turned to Valen, ready to speak.
However, the rubble moved.
A plume of dust spiraled upward as crimson horns forced their way through the wreckage. The Dragon's head emerged, eyes like furnaces. Its jaws yawned open, revealing a molten sphere coalescing in its throat — brighter, hotter, denser than any flame Damien had seen.
It spat the fireball.
Valen's hand was already in motion. His glyphwork bloomed like a constellation across the air, layers upon layers of interlocked sigils forming faster than Damien's eyes could track. No hesitation, no searching for precision — Valen cast like other people breathed.
The fourth circle defense flared to life, a barrier of radiance and spiraling geometry.
But when the fire struck, the seemingly divine barrier shattered in less than a second.
Damien's mind reeled. "Even the fourth circle—"
"I know," Valen hissed, already moving his hands again. "I suppose there's a reason it tore through the front lines so effortlessly back then. During the raid."
The Dragon stalked forward through the flames, unhurried, knowing its prey was cornered.
They were out of time.
Damien's Solence sigils ignited at his fingertips. Valen glanced at him — and in that wordless exchange, they both knew what they had to do. They cast together, threads of light tangling, knotting, and snapping into place. The twin fourth-circle structures clicked into one another, lines bending and warping until something else took shape.
It was crude, unstable — a false echo of the fifth circle. But it was there.
The Dragon's next breath slammed into the defense, fire folding and breaking over the shimmering lattice. The framework groaned like a dying star.
"Hold—!" Valen shouted through the heat.
The barrier screamed as cracks raced across it. Damien's arms felt like they were in the maw of a furnace. Every heartbeat was a stolen second.
Then, the framework ruptured.
The seal cracked with a sound like a tearing in the sky itself. Damien's head snapped to Valen, panic rushing across his face.
The Dragon reared, jaws filling with that terrible, blinding glow again.
Hopelessly, the boys threw up whatever barriers they could still conjour—thin, desperate concentrations of Solence—but before the blast came, a searing ray of light slammed straight into the creature's eye.
Circles of Solence bloomed overhead, layer upon layer, locking into place. From the shadowed edge of the courtyard, Orion stepped forward, and with a mere gesture, hundreds of bindings wrapped the calamity like threads spun from the sun.
Time seemed to halt. The air thickened, heavy with his command. The very laws of Solence bent around him, and even the beast shuddered, knowing the master of this element stood before it.
The Dragon's Maw buckled under the weight of the shackles, the fire thriving beneath its scale turned into nothing.
Only then did Orion glance at the two boys—first a small smile, then a subtle crease of concern.
"So," he asked, voice almost casual, "what were you two getting up to this late?"
Valen opened his mouth, but Damien cut him off. "You see, a Dragon jumped us while we were out on a walk. Is that common in your courtyards?"
Orion's eyes narrowed in suspicion, but he let it go with a small nod declining his words. Without leaving another breath, he turned away as members of the Exorcist Order flooded the courtyard, swarming around the bound calamity.