Philip opened fire with his pistol, using the shots as a smokescreen to close the distance. Though the lead barely slowed the attackers down, he managed to get inside their guard and land a devastating punch on the first man. The second, though, responded with an inhuman brute force.
He caught Philip's arm mid-strike and hurled him upward, slamming him violently into the masonry of the ceiling.
As Philip crashed down amid the rubble, the three remaining men — Valentin leading them — closed in around the gigantic sunflower. They began channeling a hauntingly rhythmic surge of energy, and the enormous, twisted flower began to rise, pulsing with a parasitic sort of life.
At the same time, the two rear attackers ran toward a secondary cell at the back of the room. From it, they dragged out a group of roughly twenty people, shoving and beating them along.
The prisoners looked gaunt, filthy, marked all over with signs of torture. Without a second's hesitation, Valentin grabbed one by the hair, opened a clean cut into their skin to draw out the life fluid, and offered the blood directly to the sunflower's maw, which began devouring it with ravenous hunger.
A brutal impact cut the ritual short. A pressure-fired stone crushed the skull of one of the men, dropping him lifeless on the spot. The shock hit everyone at once. Alphard, his hand transformed into a piece of artillery, gave them no time to process what had happened.
He dropped briefly to one knee, braced the cannon against it, and used his free hand to steady the trajectory of a large chunk of rubble.
The projectile launched with brutal force, tearing straight through the sunflower's stalk, cutting deep enough that the creature began to buckle, unable to hold up its own weight.
Without pausing, Alphard pulled the cane from the briefcase and activated its power. A shockwave rolled through the space, sapping the strength from Valentin and his men. Behind him, Philip stood perfectly still, ready to recite the invocation poem.
Watching his plan crumble before him, Valentin snapped. In a bloody frenzy, he tore the life from the prisoners and his own remaining collaborators alike, offering that seething mass of blood straight to the sunflower's core.
"No!" Philip shouted, desperate at the horror unfolding before him.
The energy in the room turned suffocating, and Alphard was struck by a sudden, crushing exhaustion.
Fed by the sacrifice, the sunflower began to convulse; its stalk expanded uncontrollably, collapsing the ceiling above them, while its thick roots drove deep into the earth, burying Alphard beneath the mass of vegetation and debris.
At that, Philip managed to tear himself free from the weight of the rubble and the tangled stalk. Vision clouded by dust, he began digging desperately through the thick green mass, searching for his companion.
Suddenly, a hand burst through the tangle, gripping the cane tightly. Philip didn't hesitate — he lunged forward and pulled him free from the earth's grip.
Alphard broke into a dry, hacking cough, shaking the mud off his clothes despite the crushing exhaustion weighing down his body. At that moment, the giant flower let out a thunderous roar, a guttural shriek that shattered the silence and rattled their eardrums until they ached.
"Can you finish it off?" Alphard asked, his face twisted with pain.
"I don't know — this is beyond our limit," Philip answered through clenched teeth. "With luck, I might be able to hold it back for a moment."
That was when a silhouette took shape beside the monstrous flower. Valentin watched them from above, wearing a twisted smile, his stare ice-cold.
"Go ahead, you idiots," Valentin sneered with contempt. "I know full well that fool Charlotte sent you here. You're nothing but pathetic dogs. While I make my own rules, you crawl after someone who doesn't even have the backbone for it. Damn you, all of you Noctis scum!"
That was when Valentin summoned the sunflower's ultimate form. A blinding flash tore through the darkness, accompanied by a rush of wind that shook the creature's enormous leaves.
"AAAAHHH!" Valentin screamed.
His flesh dissolved, fusing with the plant's fibers, as the sunflower let out a bellow that shook the very foundations of the cave, throwing Philip and Alphard off balance. Valentin devoured the plant's essence, rising with a newfound power.
"Be damned, all of you, in the name of the Lord of the Apocalypse!" he proclaimed, somewhere between sobs of agony and laughter of devotion.
"What is this...?" Alphard murmured, unable to process the abomination unfolding before him.
The massive stalk coiled around itself, obeying Valentin's command: it drove its green limbs into the masonry, triggering a massive collapse.
Enormous rocks crashed straight down from above. Philip and Alphard broke into a blind run, trying to dodge them through an impenetrable wall of dust and ash.
Suddenly, one of the branches seized Alphard around the torso, slamming him viciously against the stone slabs.
Alphard gritted his teeth, reshaping the flesh of one arm into a shield to absorb the force of the blows, while trying to drive his other hand into the stalk's core, only to collide against an almost impenetrable structure.
Philip gripped the cane, steadying his stance to channel its power while controlling his breath to recite the poem. But the scene had turned dire: Valentin kept Alphard pinned down, raining increasingly brutal blows against his battered body.
"Damn it... what do I do?" Philip said, gripped by desperation.
Refusing to freeze up, he maneuvered with the cane while frantically clearing the undergrowth at his feet. Suddenly, Valentin hurled Alphard against the stone wall with brutal force, and the creature released him.
Seizing the opening, Philip spotted the briefcase amid the foliage; he pulled out the potion and downed it in a single gulp.
A searing heat set his veins ablaze: his eyes flushed a deep ruby red, and his heart pounded in his chest like a war drum. Without wasting a moment, he began chanting the words of the poem.
The physical world dissolved. The ground filled with a carpet of pink flowers beneath an ethereal mist of the same hue.
Valentin let out a mocking laugh and lunged to attack, but the cane's resonance was already draining the monster's strength. Suddenly, the sky bled into an absolute crimson, and the pink flowers mutated into scarlet lilies whose stems, though thin, carried a rigidity harder than steel.
Without warning, the lilies launched like spears, driving deep into the sunflower's plant-flesh.
"AAAAGH! It hurts... it hurts too much!" Valentin howled, writhing in agony.
The sunflower's secondary stalks tried to crush Philip, but the red lilies sliced through them with a strange, almost sublime delicacy at every attempt.
One of the crimson flowers coiled around the human figure still not fully absorbed into the mass of vegetation.
"Damn you, you bastard! Let go of me!"
The lily pierced through Valentin's leg, binding him tightly and pulling, tearing apart the bloody threads still linking him to the sunflower.
In the end, the pressure exerted by the crimson lilies proved impossible to resist: Philip managed to tear through the fleshy connections and rip Valentin free from the plant's body. As Valentin collapsed to the ground, dragging himself along amid groans of agony, the gigantic sunflower thrashed violently, letting out one final guttural cry before withering and sinking toward death.
"The Lord of the Apocalypse, huh?" Philip murmured with quiet irony, approaching the creature's remains.
But just as he turned his back, Valentin used the last dregs of his magical reserve to fire a thin needle of blood aimed straight at his heart.
Before the attack could land, a sharp detonation rang out through the chamber: the shot tore through Valentin's hand, making him shriek in pain.
"Bastard," Alphard muttered, his breathing ragged and pained.
Limping heavily, he walked toward him and planted his boot against his chest, aiming the barrel of his gun directly between his eyes.
What am I supposed to do now? Do I pull the trigger? Is this the right thing to do?
A tightness rose in his chest as he felt the full weight of the decision settle onto his shoulders.
"Please! Please, don't kill me, I'm begging you!" Valentin sobbed, his face soaked in tears and snot. "I... I never wanted to do this. It was the cult of the Lord of the Apocalypse, it wasn't my fault!"
Philip stayed silent for a few seconds, studying the hesitation in Alphard's eyes, testing his resolve.
"Kill him," he ordered, his tone flat.
"But he's already defeated..."
"Kill him, damn it!"
Philip lunged at Alphard, gripping his arm with an iron grasp, and pressed the barrel of the revolver against the prisoner's forehead. The cylinder and muzzle, still burning hot from the earlier exchange of fire, scorched the skin of his head instantly.
"AAAAHHH! It burns, it burns too much!" Valentin howled, writhing beneath the weight of them both.
I have to do this if I want to go home.
Alphard turned his face aside and pulled the trigger without looking. The shot was clean and final: the blast swallowed Valentin's screams, ending his life instantly.
Alphard's fingers went slack, and he let the revolver fall, clattering against the rubble. With no strength left to hold himself up, his body gave way to the overwhelming exhaustion, the sharp throb of his wounds, and a thick bitterness pressing down on his chest.
Philip studied the corpse for a couple of seconds before breaking the silence, his voice calm and severe.
"This is part of the job too. Sometimes, a true monster isn't some aberrant creature or an anomaly... Sometimes it wears the mask of a human being and walks freely among us. That's what we are. We exist beyond human reason, and just like you, we're bastards fighting against fate, against madness, against misery itself."
Alphard stared into the emptiness, trying to convince himself that all of this was just a nightmare, but the pounding of his own heart denied it, almost as if it were speaking to him, telling him it wasn't.