"Spear_of_Everfrost ..."
The Queen raises her hand. A spear of ice materializes in the air. It's sharp and gleaming.
Shino throws her rope, hooking it around Adrian's waist. She yanks hard, dragging him back into the barrier just as the Queen merges back into a single, towering form. The world stills. The air grows thick. It smelled of fire and ash. Even breathing feels heavy.
Rei grabs Calder and leaps backward.
"Are you okay, Adrian?" Yuto asks, his voice tense.
"I'm fine," Adrian replies, blood still trailing down his cheek. "I can still see. Focus on the boss, not me."
The Queen raises her hand again. The spear of ice slams into the barrier with a deafening crack. The shock makes Teruki stumble. She grips her chest. She gasped from the recoil.
Han kneels beside her. She grabs his arm, drawing on his mana to stay conscious. Han winces but smiles through the pain, refusing to let go.
Teruki forces her trembling hands forward, channeling healing magic toward Adrian. His wound seals. The eye doesn't return. Shino rips a strip of cloth from her sleeve and ties it around his head.
Then the Queen charges. The ground quakes beneath her.
Viri darts behind her, thrusting her hands into the earth.
"Get away from my friend!" she shouts, as a wall of solid stone erupts upward. It blocked the Queen's strike.
The Queen kept firing spells of ice, water, and fire into the barrier, but none of them made it through.
"We cannot just stand here," I heard Gerald shout. He charged at the queen with a speed no one expected from his size.
The impact echoed across the chamber. His shield slammed into the queen so hard that the sound rattled the stone. It was coated in the same strange material as before, and when it struck, the queen turned that same frightening purple.
A flare of magic shot into the air. A sharp crack followed.
The blast had come from Seraphina. She appeared at my side, her light green eyes fierce behind her mask, mana burning like a storm.
"Let's kill this thing," she yelled.
Her light green eyes glowed as her signature aura flared.
"For too long we allowed crusaders to take our burden," Rei said, stepping forward.
Viri grinned and drew her shotgun, a weapon she almost never used. The smile on her face was confident, hungry for the fight.
Calder stepped back through the barrier Tenshi maintained. He lifted the cloth covering Adrian's injured eye. Even though Yuto had given him a potion, nothing changed. The healing did not take.
I had seen Tenshi regenerate limbs with her magic. She was more precise than any healer I had ever known. But the tags the queen added to her spells made Adrian's wound refuse every form of healing. And to think this was only first circle magic.
Javelins formed in the sky, but each one withered before it fully appeared.
"Is it running out of mana?" I asked. No. That should have been impossible.
"Is it scared?" I wondered.
Gerald drew his familiar axe from his back. "This is for my guild leader!"
He charged again. The axe slammed into the Queen. She staggered. I noticed Gerald slicing at the gems on her helmet. They did not shatter since they were part of her body, but each one flickered with unstable light.
A realization hit me. I saw Iso reach the same conclusion.
"It is not the gems that hold her power," Iso murmured. "It is her mana."
The Queen pushed herself up from Gerald's last strike. For an instant she moved with inhuman speed and strength.
Then she ruptured.
Her body burst apart like snow caught in a rushing wind, scattering before hitting the ground.
Viri placed a finger on the side of her shotgun. A rune lit up beneath her touch. I could not read it, but I recognized the ability.
Chains of metal erupted from the ground. They wrapped around the Slime Queen's reforming body, tightening until her movements slowed.
I glanced at Yuto and saw a sharp glint in his eye.
"Get one of those chains to me," he told Shino.
The Slime Queen writhed under the pressure of the chains. The ground beneath her shifted to sand. The ground swirled into a pit that locked her in place like quicksand.
The Queen smiled.
She twisted her magic and tried to push through the bindings. Gerald slashed at her again, his axe striking the chains and sending a heavy shock through the cavern walls.
The Queen did not even flinch.
Rei drew a katana from her side. A burst of red mana filled the cavern. It bathes everything in a fierce crimson glow. Her blade shimmered in the dim light as she dashed forward. Sparks of fire erupted around her.
The impact shook the air. A loud boom echoed through the cavern as she collided with the bound Queen.
Shino and Gerald reinforced the stone surrounding the chains, pushing their own mana into the entanglement. But the Queen only laughed.
The rune on Viri's shotgun flickered wildly, but she held her stance firm.
A new rune appeared at the tip of Seraphina's sniper. She lowered herself to the ground and took a precise prone position.
A light green rune along the tip of the sniper.
"TheoreticalSkill_Improvised_AbsoluteIceCocoon( Effect: manadrain,Charged)" Sera said quietly.
She rose to her feet as the rune continued to pull mana into itself.
"Materialize_(Weapon: Winterlance, Player: Seraphina)"
A soft green glow fills the cavern. From that light, a white lance forms. Pure glacite , an embodiment of Seraphina herself. The weapon looks ancient and sacred. Parts of the lance are cracked from when she fell, and a strip of red cloth is wrapped around its center like a binding seal.
Sera and Iso nod. Sera dashes forward.
SLAM.
Rei, Sera, Viri, and Gerald hold the Queen in place. The Slime Queen thrashes, trying to twist through the chains. She shifts, melts, reforms, but the bindings refuse to break. Fire, earth, ice, and Gerald's raw strength keep her contained.
And then, just as it looks like the Queen will break free…
"Now!" Iso yells.
POP.
Seraphina's sniper fires. The bullet looks simple, nothing but a white shard of mana.
But when it hits the crown, everything changes.
The gems crack.
Mana surges.
A cold pulse spreads through the Queen's body like a living virus.
Ice blooms across her form, crawling over her limbs and chest and face. In an instant she is trapped, frozen in a thick cocoon of white frost.
Their weapons get caught in the ice as it grows. One second later and they would have been frozen solid too.
The ground itself begins to frost over, spreading outward from the Queen like a field of winter. The temperature drops sharply, and every breath turns to fog.
The Queen is locked in place.
Frozen. Silenced. Contained.