I soon discovered that looking for people through mana was quite easy, at least when compared to searching for monsters by using anathema. They were loud, so to speak. While monsters were akin to a light, almost imperceptible rustle, people were trumpets blown in a library. Well, maybe that was too strong an image. The fact still remained, however; people weren’t that hard to find once you got the hang of it.

“We have to hurry then,” Giacomo said once I had finished recounting the events of the last hour.

I found the group he headed sooner than I had anticipated. They were already searching for us. Apparently, they had been trying to contact Alessandro and Simone since early in the morning, and when it became clear that something was interfering with our communication line, Giacomo decided to look for us and regroup.

“Show us the way.”

I nodded, but just as I was about to turn around, a shadow was cast upon us.

Giacomo was quick to move. He shoved Cristina and me out of the way and then dove aside too. A mass of dark, midnight feathers swooped in from above, falling to the ground with the momentum of a freight train in a sonorous crash.

Whatever the thing was it wasn’t fazed by impact with the ground. Its long plumed neck turned towards Giulia. The redhead didn’t even have the time to blink. The yellow, gleaming beak of the creature snapped forwards at an impossible speed and the girl’s head was no more.

She slumped headless to the ground in a spurt of blood, as the same red liquid poured now also out of where the lower and higher mandibles of the beast met.

I heard Cristina’s wail and then the monster was engulfed in a torrent of scorching flames. Giacomo appeared before it, with his spear drawn back. Its edge flared with qi, and then he attacked. The weapon turned into a white blur, diving into the magical fire before it could even begin to die out.

Two other Awakened, whom I recognized to be a B-ranked warrior and a B-ranked mage, materialized close to the monster. The warrior moved with a shield as tall as he was before it. Qi blazed all over its surface, looking like an impenetrable fortress. It didn’t save him from the tail. It swung out of the flames like a green whip, lashing at the man and splattering both the shield and him against a distant tree.

Giacomo screamed something; then he had to dive out of the way as the monster’s beak darted out of the flames.

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I stood entranced as the monster went through our group like a hot knife would have through butter. I snapped out of it only at the inhuman screech the beast issued when Giacomo’s spear tore through one of its leathery wings.

It was a cockatrice, I idly realized. The moment passed and then it was hell. The monster turned towards the thick of our group, and from its parted mandibles spewed a column of mist.

“Run!” Giacomo screamed at them, but it was too late. The fog reached them in a heartbeat, and only the mages familiar with Mana Step managed to escape. The others, and the B-ranked mage who had been far too close, were swallowed whole, and like dust blown by the wind, they were swept away in the breeze.

“Flesh. Bones. Blood. Life. You needn’t any, but I offer them all the same.” Hearing the chant, I turned to look at Cristina. “Without words, the chant is lost.” She didn’t hear me calling her, shouting at her—imploring her to stop. She wasn’t listening. She wasn’t crying. She wasn’t despairing. She was focused on one thing and one thing only—the monster. “Without chants, the spell is powerless. Without power, we die. Death without struggle is meaningless.” Hundreds, and then thousands of lines lit on her body, depicting a maze of geometrical patterns. “Thus, I struggle as they did.” Giacomo’s voice joined my own, yet she didn’t stop. “Their names are forgotten, but their legends still live. Their sacrifice will be remembered because it mattered—because it made a difference. In the same way You took what was theirs and fuelled their rage, I offer You what is mine to fuel my rage. I offer my body. I offer my self. Add my name to Your records. Strike me from existence. Song of Sacrifice; the 4th Stanza—Wrath of the world.”

The circuits of power running across her flared once and she was no more, turned to mana—all that she was became pure, untapped potential. The spell matrix brightened a second time, siphoning only which it had been offered, and like flames fed kerosene, it flared to life.

Time seemed to come to stop, as the matrix stretched to cover the ground in a hundred-meter radius in the blink of an eye. The Furia looked at it—at the spell matrix fuelled by the very life of an A-ranker—curious among all things.

A hand rose out of the ground. It was covered in bark and moss. It was made of the very roots of the dungeon’s trees. It grasped at the earth and pulled. Slowly, a giant almost seven meters tall rose out of the earth. It was made of wood and soil, and on its body, the spell matrix was branded in the color of blood.

Its eyes—fiery globes of molten earth—regarded the monster. The monster stared back. The two stood one in front of the other for what seemed an eternity, then they moved. The giant opened its mouth in a soundless scream. The cockatrice belched a torrent of that grey fog.

The construct dashed right through it, seemingly immune. It tackled the beast to the ground. Its hands grasped the monster’s neck, turning back into the hundreds of roots that made them. They twisted around it and tightened. The Furia issued a strangled cry, and its beak pecked at the giant’s face, shearing through the wood as if it hadn’t even been there.

The giant kept pushing the cockatrice down, however. From its body, root after enormous root dislodged, raining down on the Furia with the force of a meteor. They burrowed within its flesh, driven by the magic of the construct; each was accompanied by a sonorous wail of the cockatrice before it reached the ground, anchoring itself to the earth. Slowly, the giant turned into a trunk suspended in the air by roots. The cockatrice was held there too, right beneath it—it too suspended by the roots.

Despite the blood pouring out of it, the dungeon’s spawn was still alive, however. It struggled against its bindings, using its beak to work at the wood.

“Move!” Giacomo bellowed. He grabbed my collar and yanked me away from the macabre spectacle. “We need to move!” he repeated.

The crack was all the warning we had. It wasn’t enough. We were within the cockatrice’s grasp before we could understand what was happening. For an instant, Giacomo and I crossed each other's gaze. Then he was but wet paste between the sharp claws and the yellow, coarse skin of the monster.

Mercifully, darkness claimed me.