'It's the final wave.'
By this point, Soren was a complete mess, the kind of mess that stopped being dramatic and started being humiliating, because there was nothing heroic about the way his body was failing him, or the way he had to keep swallowing spit just to stop himself from retching.
"Huff… hah…"
His breath tasted like smoke and iron, and every inhale scraped his throat raw, as if the air itself had turned into sand.
Minor wounds covered him, except they were only minor in the way a dozen cuts were "minor," scratches layered over scratches, stinging wherever the mud dried and pulled, burning whenever sweat seeped into the open skin.
"Huff…"
He was drenched from head to toe in a mixture of blood, sweat, and mud, so much that he genuinely could not tell how much of it was his anymore.
The goblin blood had started to cool on him, thickening into sticky patches that tugged at fabric and hair.
His uniform was shredded into something closer to rags, and the smell of everything clung to him, rancid and metallic and wrong, like a butcher's waste bin left out too long.
"Hah…"
His forearm still throbbed where a dagger had cut him earlier, the numbness coming and going in unpleasant pulses, and his palm hurt where he had grabbed torch wood barehanded, the burn now a wet sting under grime.
His shoulder ached from the bite, bruised deep under skin, and every time his lungs expanded it pulled at his torn chest cloth, scraping against raw abrasions.
His mana pool was nearly empty.
'If I had to guess… two more casts. Three if I'm lucky and I don't fuck up.'
That thought should have been clean, clinical, a resource calculation, but even his thinking felt sloppy now, as if exhaustion had soaked into his brain the same way blood had soaked into his sleeves.
The title's recovery kept him from collapsing outright, drip-feeding just enough stamina that he stayed upright, but it couldn't erase what he had spent to get here.
Even before the quest began, he had been drained from the walk through Rena Forest, the endless roots and slopes and vigilance, the way his F-rank body had been forced to pretend it wasn't an F-rank body, because he had been too stubborn to turn back.
He had endured anyway, he had kept moving anyway, and now the bill had come due.
His legs trembled, almost giving out under him with every step.
The dizziness from exhaustion kept washing in like a tide, making the torchlight smear at the edges of his vision, and making his balance feel slightly delayed, as though his body was responding a heartbeat too late to his thoughts.
His grip on the dagger kept loosening without him meaning it to, fingers uncurling like they were trying to drop the burden and be done.
'I can't give up, though.'
Not because he was brave, not because of any noble vow, but because giving up meant dying, and the idea of dying out here, alone, as goblins watched and a hobgoblin laughed, filled him with a sick rage that he couldn't swallow.
He forced his eyes sideways, to the corner of his vision where the timer sat like a taunt.
.
▶ Survive ◀
[11:07/13:00]
.
There wasn't much time left.
'Eleven minutes,' his brain supplied, immediately followed by a second thought that made his stomach twist, 'I've only been fighting for eleven minutes.'
It felt impossible.
Time in fights never moved the way it should, it either crawled or vanished, and right now it felt like both, like he had been trapped in the same bloody minute since the quest window appeared.
'I can do this.'
He told himself that, but the thought came with a bitter hitch, because he also knew something else.
He could stall.
He could keep doing what he had been doing, turning the ground to mud, tackling goblins, stabbing soft places, wasting his dignity to preserve his life, and it would probably work, because the hobgoblin's pride had been helping him far more than any tactic ever could.
But the thought of simply surviving, of letting that thing keep smiling at him until the timer ran out, made something inside him curl up and snarl.
The hobgoblin had been watching him like a joke.
It had sent goblins out in neat waves like it was hosting a show.
And Soren… Soren had bled for it, had fought like an animal for its amusement, and the idea of walking away without leaving a mark on it felt unbearable.
So throughout all the waves, somewhere under the fear and exhaustion, a separate thread of thought had kept going, stubborn and petulant and painfully human.
'How do I hurt it?'
Not kill it, because that was a fantasy his body could not afford, but hurt it, make it flinch, make it lose that smug, lazy certainty for even a second.
By the time the final wave approached, he had something that could technically be called a plan.
It was a horrible plan.
It wasn't clever, it wasn't elegant, and if he thought about it too hard he would realise it was probably suicidal, but his brain was mush, his body was shredded, and this was all he could scrape together in the wreckage.
Soren wasn't a schemer.
He wasn't stupid, but he wasn't experienced either, and it would have been laughable to imagine him producing some genius tactic while half delirious, soaked in gore, and trembling on failing legs.
The five goblins started in.
Torchlight bobbed.
Feet slapped through mud and leaves.
The ring tightened around him, obedient bodies watching.
Soren forced his grip on the dagger to tighten until his fingers cramped, and he began forming another magic circle in his left hand.
Wooooonggggg—
The lines wavered immediately.
"「Ga—!"
A wave of dizziness hit him like a fist.
"—Ugh!"
The circle shattered into nothing, mana slipping away uselessly, and his stomach lurched with panic because he had wasted one of his last casts on nothing.
He blinked hard, trying to clear his vision, and the goblins kept coming.
He didn't have the luxury of recovering.
He started forming the circle again, hands shaking, breath hitching.
'Please… work… please… please…'
His chest tightened, and for a moment he was convinced he wouldn't manage it, that his fingers would simply stop obeying him.
Then the lines stabilised, barely, trembling but holding long enough.
"「Gaia!」"
The earth beneath the goblins softened, then liquefied into sucking mud, grabbing at their feet, swallowing ankles, stealing momentum.
It wouldn't hold long, he knew that now, he had felt how quickly goblins learned to tear themselves free, and he had learned with them, learned to move the moment the mud took.
He didn't wait.
He ran.
It wasn't a clean sprint, more like a stagger that he forced into speed, boots slipping, knees screaming, lungs burning, and he pushed through it anyway, passing goblins that were still struggling to free their legs, ignoring the claws that swiped for him, ignoring the torch that swung wide and missed his hair by a breath.
His eyes stayed locked forward.
On the hobgoblin.
.
▶ Survive ◀
[11:37/13:00]
.
It felt wrong to glance at the timer mid-charge, but he did anyway, because part of him needed proof this wasn't madness, needed to know how much time he was stealing.
It felt like twenty minutes of hell had passed in thirty seconds.
He focused back on the hobgoblin, and for the first time since it appeared, its expression shifted.
Surprise flickered across its face, quick and ugly.
Then, as if it regretted showing anything at all, it smoothed back into smug amusement, lips curling, eyes bright with contempt.
From its perspective, it probably looked like a desperate last rush, a pathetic human throwing himself at the king because he had run out of other options.
That wasn't quite it.
Soren wasn't charging because he believed he could win.
He was charging because he was sick of being laughed at.
He had no noble thoughts like "I need to defeat evil" or "I must protect someone."
There was no grand meaning here, no banner to die beneath, only a petty, furious need to land a blow, to carve even a small dent into the pride that had been treating him like a toy.
'Just one.'
The hobgoblin still didn't move, watching with lazy curiosity, as if even this was only mildly interesting.
That indifference annoyed Soren so much it made his vision shake.
'I wish I could kill it.'
He had tried to think of killing it, had stared at its body and searched for a method the way you searched a locked door for a weak hinge, but no matter how hard he strained, his mind stayed blank.
He was too short to reach its throat.
Too weak to pierce deep enough to matter.
Too unskilled to land anything meaningful before it decided to end him.
So he had settled for hurting it.
Even that had required improvisation, desperation, and a spell he had never dared to cast.
Soren reached the hobgoblin.
He didn't slow.
He leapt.
The last remains of his stamina poured into that movement, his body screaming as he forced it to give more than it had, and for a heartbeat he was weightless, suspended between torchlight and shadow.
Then he collided with the hobgoblin's torso.
His dagger drove forward with his momentum.
The blade pierced into the hobgoblin's belly, not deep enough to be lethal, not even close, but enough that he felt the resistance give, felt flesh tear under the point, and hot blood immediately spilt over his knuckles.
[KEAAAAAAKKK—!]
The hobgoblin's roar slammed into the night, not amused now, not theatrical, but sharp with genuine pain and outrage.
Soren hung there, literally dangling from the dagger for a second, feet scrabbling uselessly against the hobgoblin's thigh, and his stomach flipped because he was suddenly aware of how insane this was, how easily it could simply rip him off and snap him in half.
But he didn't stop.
He forced his left hand up, shaking so hard he almost couldn't form the lines, and began a new circle.
It glowed orange.
Not [Aqua], not [Gaia], not anything he had used before, but a colour he had only ever seen once, a single spell cast in the distance of his classroom, something so basic and yet so terrifyingly direct.
He had never tried it because he hadn't trusted himself not to mess it up.
But right now he didn't have the luxury of worrying about confidence.
The circle completed with a wobble, and the light in his palm grew bright enough to sting his eyes.
The hobgoblin finally moved, hand snapping toward him, but it was too late, because Soren had already committed, already poured the last ugly scraps of will into the only words that mattered.
"「IGNITION—!!!」"
————「❤︎」————