Silence. A dead, breathless quiet in a cage of their own making. The Felguard stood amidst the wreckage, its rage no longer a wild fire, but a cold, focused point of hatred aimed directly at them.
"We're… we're going to die here," Zhang Min whispered, his voice broken.
Aurelia's breath misted in the air. "Its hide is too thick," she said, her voice tight but steady. "Its strength is beyond ours. We cannot win a direct confrontation." She turned, her silver-blue eyes, now stripped of all arrogance and filled with a desperate pragmatism, locking onto Irelion. "You. You had a plan to trap it. Do you have one to kill it?"
A clear concession. In that moment, she was not the prodigy and he was not the failure. She was a sword, asking a swordsman where to strike.
Irelion's mind was already a whirlwind. He had fought Felguards before. Dozens of them. He clawed through the archives of his past life, past grand battles and the faces of his fallen swords, hunting for a weakness, a single, exploitable flaw.
A memory surfaced, sharp and hot as a brand. A brutal skirmish on the Crimson Plains. Ravenna, his Fourth Sword, a whirlwind of fire, had melted the pauldron from a Felguard's shoulder. And for a split second, he had seen it.
"It has a weak point," Irelion said, his voice low and urgent, drawing the eyes of the other three. "Under its left pauldron, where the neck meets the shoulder. A thinner plate of chitin. A direct, powerful thrust there could kill it."
Zhang Min's brief flicker of hope died. "But… we can't get close enough! Its axe…"
"We don't get close," Irelion countered, his eyes darting around their prison, assessing every rock, every shadow, every frozen patch of ground. "We make it come to us. We make it expose itself." The tactician was in full command now, his voice sharp with the authority of a hundred battlefields.
"Here's the plan," he said, his words precise and absolute. "Li Wei, Zhang Min. You are the bait. Your only job is to stay alive and keep it angry. Dodge. Yell. Throw rocks. Force it to make clumsy swings. Keep it off balance. Can you do that?"
Li Wei looked at his bleeding arm, then at the demon, and gave a grim, determined nod. Zhang Min, still trembling, looked at the calm certainty in Irelion's eyes and found a sliver of courage. He nodded too.
"Good," Irelion said, turning to Aurelia. "Senior Sister. You are the key. Your ice is the only thing that can hinder its movement. When it commits to a swing, I need you to freeze its footing. Not to trap it, just to make it slip. To force it to overcorrect its balance. It needs to stumble."
A plan built on feints and exploitation, not power. A desperate, elegant gambit. Aurelia processed the command, her mind instantly seeing the logic.
"And you?" she asked.
"I am the blade," Irelion said, his hand gripping the hilt of his cheap iron sword. "When it stumbles, I will take the shot."
A suicide mission. A plan with a dozen points of failure. The only plan they had. Aurelia looked at him, truly looked at him, and saw not a failure, but a commander.
"Understood," she said, a sharp, new resolve in her voice.
"Positions," Irelion ordered. "Now."
They scattered, moving with a desperate, unified purpose. The Felguard watched the insects scurrying, a low growl of contempt rumbling in its chest. It raised its massive, ichor-dripping axe, its burning eyes settling on Li Wei, the wounded one. It chose its first victim and charged.