The first strike was chaos.
The Scourgeborn lunged from the cracked wall like a memory torn loose too fast, too wrong, limbs jittering as if skipping through frames of time. Its wail ripped across the chamber, not through air, but through thought, fracturing focus.
Sorin raised his warding glyphs too late.
A jagged limb tore across his chest. Blood sprayed.
"Scatter!" Vera shouted, flipping into a backward roll as twin daggers met a second Scourgeborn crawling along the ceiling like a shadow's echo.
But they weren't ready.
Lira tried to stabilize the air with frost barriers, but her lines collapsed before forming the ruin's distortion twisted sigils mid-cast.
Elen's blade clashed with one of the beasts in a shower of sparks, but it was fast too fast and familiar. Her breath caught. For a split second, she saw her own masked reflection in its mirrored face. That pause almost cost her her life.
Another hissed from the right. Sorin went down, groaning.
"Retreat! Form up!" Lira barked, but their formation was broken. Cracks spread between them, not just in the floor but in rhythm. In trust.
They fought like five separate storms blinding, brilliant but misaligned.
And the ruin devoured dissonance.
Seren's blade screamed through the air, cleaving one of the creatures in half. But for every monster she felled, another rose from the stone like a wound being remembered.
Then one of them slipped past. Straight toward Vera.
It raised a limb that shimmered with unstable entropy.
Vera's eyes widened. There was no time. Not for evasion. Not for rewinding.
Seren moved without thinking.
She roared and the ground broke.
A column of flame erupted around her, wild and raw and unbound. It wasn't elegant. It wasn't planned. It was anger the kind that ignites when the people you carry start falling.
She slammed her greatsword into the ground, flame veins surging out in a dome of heat.
"Get behind me!"
The others obeyed.
The Scourgeborn struck the fire and screamed its flesh recoiling as molten tongues curled around it. Another tried to flank. Seren swung in a full arc, the trail of her blade burning a crescent wall.
Ash coated the ground.
Sorin gasped behind her, wounded but alive. Elen rolled next to him, blades up. Lira and Vera dropped into mirrored stance flank and freeze.
"Fall in," Seren growled. Her voice was steady now. Unshakeable.
"We're moving as one. Elen: counter. Lira: suppress right. Sorin, give me flame. Vera shadow intercept. You're my left."
They nodded.
The shift was immediate.
Lira breathed out. Her frost magic stabilized behind Seren's flames, layering cold precision on raw heat. As one burned, the other froze.
Sorin's glyphs glowed again this time syncing to Seren's power. Fire shaped into lines. Geometry. Control.
Elen moved with her old rhythm but not alone this time. Every slash met the beat of Vera's shadow-step. Where Elen struck, Vera followed. Where Vera faltered, Elen shielded.
They moved like gears now. Like music. Seren at the center. The Iron Howl.
The Scourgeborn shrieked in disarray. Their mirror faces twisted, unsure. The fear was new.
Because unity was fire. And Specter Team had found their rhythm.
The chamber fell still.
Six Scourgeborn dead. One retreating deeper into the ruin's dark.
Sorin coughed, sitting against the wall, blood seeping through gauze Lira pressed into his side.
"Eighteen percent chance," he muttered. "Huh."
"We made it go up," Elen said, cracking a faint grin.
Seren said nothing at first. She looked down at her hands still smoking from the flames she'd unleashed. Not like before. Different. Purposeful.
"We walk forward now," she said finally. "Together. No more solos. No more hesitation. They're learning. So we evolve faster."
Vera nodded. "Shadows move clearer under fire."
"And ice holds better next to flame," Lira added.
Sorin chuckled. "Just don't expect me to tank hits again. I like my ribs unbroken."
They laughed.
And then they walked.
Past ash. Past ruin. Past the place where five fractured storms finally forged into a single, searing front.
Deeper into Ghar Ultan. Where something ancient waited.
And this time it would face all of them.
Together.