(A/N: Imma be honest, I fuck up this fight a bit… 😅, so bare with it)

[Third Person’s PoV]

Lucian felt a deep, primal jolt surge through his chest—a flare of instinct so sharp and sudden it was as if the very universe had screamed a warning. Something was wrong. Terribly wrong. He didn’t need time to think. He knew.

Medusa was in danger.

Without a second’s hesitation, Lucian let go of conscious control and yielded completely to instinct. His thoughts quieted, drowned beneath the tide of urgency that burned in his veins. His body moved with no thought or command from him.

From his shadow, Bartholomew erupted, the onyx bird morphing into a sleek strip of black cloth that wrapped swiftly around Lucian’s eyes. Darkness consumed his vision, but it didn’t matter. He didn’t need to see.

As Lucian leaned forward, black flames ignited beneath his feet. They didn’t just blaze—they detonated, ripping apart the ground floor and uprooting everything around him with a fury that mirrored his own. In a flash, Lucian vanished, launching himself into a blur of motion, tearing across the air toward the gaping hole from which he’d once been flung.

Though blindfolded, Lucian saw in ways that transcended vision. He felt everything—each vibration in the air, the faintest tremor in the earth, the subtle fluctuations of cursed energy that tainted the atmosphere like poison. It all poured into his senses, painting a vivid map in his mind.

And then he sensed it—a storm of violent, corrupted energy, erupting from Medusa like a hurricane of despair.

It wasn’t ordinary magic. No, it was something else. Something ancient and catastrophic.

From the depths of Medusa’s mouth surged a torrent of ebony mist—an outpouring of hatred, agony, and grief. All of it had been drawn out by Lucian’s [Curse-Eater] technique. But this curse had not been a mere affliction. It had not simply festered—it had evolved. This was no mortal poison. It was divine in origin. Crafted by Athena herself. Fueled by centuries of suffering, betrayal, and solitude, the curse had become something monstrous.

A malformed god’s wrath, condensed into physical form.

The curse energy coalesced, twisting violently as it grew. Within seconds, it formed a towering, grotesque figure that burst through the ceiling above like a creature born of nightmare.

The entity stood hunched and immense, blotting out the room like a living shadow. Its body was half-covered in cracked, grey scales—fossilized remnants of Medusa’s petrification. The other half was a roiling storm of crimson and black energy, a writhing mass of cursed mist from which deformed eyes, snarling mouths, and disjointed limbs constantly emerged and vanished.

Though Lucian couldn’t see it, he knew what it looked like.

Its face was a broken mask—Medusa’s original face—cast in cracked stone, glowing red eyes weeping trails of black ichor. The tears sizzled as they struck the floor, eating through it like acid. From its scalp, a swarm of serpents lashed out—long, thick pythons, each one radiating malevolent energy. Its lower body trailed off into a massive, writhing tail of smoke and black sludge that corroded everything it touched.

The creature opened its mouth.

What emerged was not just a roar—but a howl of torment, a death-cry that shook the foundations of the building and sent a violent pulse of pressure through the air.

Without a second thought, Lucian shot forward. He tackled Medusa and pulled her into his arms, wrapping her tightly against his chest. Shadows gathered around them like a cocoon—and in an instant, they vanished, slipping beyond the monster’s reach.

They reemerged deep within the forest that surrounded Medusa’s shop, carried by a trail of black smoke that dissipated as Lucian skidded to a stop. He knelt, still holding Medusa in a princess carry, the weight of her limp body grounding him.

His muscles trembled slightly. That detail surprised him.

‘Just how powerful is that thing?’ Lucian thought, chest heaving. ‘Its very presence… It drained me. I could feel my body beginning to calcify, like it was turning me to stone just by existing near it…’

Lucian clicked his tongue in frustration. He was cornered by decisions he didn’t want to make. If he activated his Brightheart form, he could purify the curse energy instantly—but doing so would prevent him from consuming it. That wasn’t an option. He wanted it. There was a reason as to why Athena had said his Avarice was his mortal sin.

Worse, he couldn’t summon his armor. That would dull his seismic sense, the one thing giving him an edge while blindfolded. He had to feel the world through vibrations—sight alone couldn’t protect him here.

There was a reason his body had called Bartholomew to blindfold him.

Even though Lucian was supposed to be resistant to curses, something in his intuition had screamed at him: Don’t look at it. This was no ordinary curse. It was divine.

If he had looked directly into the eyes of that thing… his very soul would have turned to stone, crumbling into dust and scattering on the wind.

‘I’ll need to fight it at a distance,’ he reasoned. ‘Its aura alone curses everything around it.’

Lucian gently set Medusa down beneath a large, moss-covered tree, brushing strands of hair away from her sweat-soaked face. She was barely conscious—her breathing shallow, her energy drained.

“Rest now,” he said quietly. “I’ll handle the rest.”

Medusa’s hand weakly lifted, reaching for him. “Be… careful…”

Lucian caught her hand and pressed it gently into her lap. “I’ll end this quickly.”

He didn’t wait for a reply. He stood and turned his back to her, walking steadily into the dark. As he lifted his arm, the ring on his finger began to glow, reshaping itself in a swirl of magic.

In his hand appeared a sleek, black bow.

Lucian crouched down, pressing his hand firmly into the cool forest floor. A surge of purple static crackled from his palm, lacing across the ground like spiderwebs of lightning. The energy pulsed as he activated [Magnetic Manipulation], drawing forth black sand from beneath the soil. The granules hovered in the air, vibrating with intensity as they began to swirl and condense. Slowly, the sand took form, elongating and hardening until it shaped itself into a deadly lance.

At its tip, a rotating drill began to emerge, spinning rapidly. Sparks erupted as it gained momentum, the violent rotation eventually bursting into roaring black flames. Dark red streaks of Lucian’s magic fed into the lance, twining with the fire and creating a vortex of black and crimson energy—unstable, volatile, and powerful. The air around it shimmered, warping under the sheer force of magic and heat. The weapon hummed with lethal promise, a blend of destruction incarnate.

Lucian inhaled deeply, calming his breath. With practiced ease, he lifted the massive lance and rested it against his bow, notched like an oversized arrow. His muscles flexed as he drew the bowstring back, his form steady, unshaken by the weapon’s unnatural weight. The tension in the bowstring trembled like a living thing, straining under the magnitude of the force about to be unleashed.

Lucian’s terrifying reputation as an archer wasn’t just due to his power or precision—it was because he didn’t need to see his target. His eyes, while useful, were simply accessories. His true sight came from [Clairvoyance], a mystic awareness that allowed him to detect presences miles away. Through this ability, he located the cursed monstrosity still lingering in the ruined building—searching, hunting.

The moment was now.

Lucian leaned back further, angling the shot, and released. The lance exploded forward, a deafening shockwave erupting as it cut through the air. Trees bent and branches snapped as the force of the projectile tore through the forest, leaving a trail of chaos in its wake.

At the exact moment the lance left his bow, Lucian vanished, blinking through the shadows. He reappeared on the opposite side of the battlefield, high up in a tree, preparing his next strike. But he froze mid-draw. His senses screamed a warning.

Gorgon had noticed.

A name Lucian had chosen to call it for the sake of simplicity.

Lucian’s awareness detected the shift before his eyes could. The lance, once a falling star aimed straight for the heart of the beast, suddenly slowed mid-air. Gorgon’s grotesque, glowing eyes snapped upward—and everything changed.

The cursed entity’s gaze flared with divine malice. In an instant, the lance began to calcify. Black flames turned to grey stone, the drill froze, and the entire weapon shattered into dust mid-flight, disintegrating as if it had never existed.

Lucian clicked his tongue in frustration. “This is going to be annoying as hell,” he muttered, now perched atop a high branch.

Before he could move again, Gorgon’s red eyes shifted toward him.

Move!

Without hesitation, Lucian vanished just as the tree he’d been standing on turned to solid stone. It cracked, groaned, and collapsed, crumbling under its own petrified weight.

Now flitting between trees like a wraith, Lucian narrowed his eyes in concentration.

‘I have two options…’ he thought grimly as he blurred from one perch to the next, barely staying ahead of the cursed gaze. ‘Either I chip away at it slowly, stalling for time… or I go head-to-head in a full-on brawl.’

Neither path was ideal. The first risked exhaustion—death by attrition. The second was far more dangerous: a gamble where one mistake would leave him petrified and helpless. It would be a race against time.

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