Chapter 58: Turning the Tide

*Rudolf's group*

Rudolf's group reached the fight last, and in raw strength, they weren't close to what the others could bring to bear. Most of them were still Level 2, still carrying the particular stiffness of people who hadn't done this more than a handful of times. But in sheer numbers, they came close to being the second-largest force out here, and the moment they folded into the fight, the difference was immediate. Monsters that had been splitting their attention between three separate fronts suddenly had a fourth to worry about, and the pressure on everyone already fighting eased by a noticeable margin.

Rudolf's approach was nothing like the others'. He didn't hang back and he didn't charge in either — he walked at the front of his own people, barrier already raised, and let the monsters come to him.

The first one came fast and low, and Rudolf caught it dead in front of him with a wall of solid, humming energy that stopped its charge cold, claws scraping uselessly against a surface it couldn't push through. He didn't wait for anyone else to react. He stepped around the edge of his own barrier and drove his spear into the thing's exposed side before it had finished registering that it wasn't moving anymore. It went down in one motion.

The second one, he handled differently on purpose. Another monster slammed into the barrier a few minutes later, pinned in place the same way, snarling and scrabbling at a wall it couldn't see. This time Rudolf didn't move. „Now! It's yours!“ he called back to one of the fighters trailing near him — someone was at the border to Level 3, spear shaking slightly in both hands. The student hesitated for half a second, then lunged in and buried the spear where Rudolf pointed. The kill wasn't clean, and it wasn't fast, but it landed. Rudolf held the barrier steady the entire time, making sure nothing about the outcome had ever really been in doubt.

Matteo Rossi barely needed anyone's help anymore. Whatever he'd picked up fighting alongside Michael had stuck, and even though his talent *Rhythmic Thrust* still wasn't something he'd fully mastered, he had enough practice now to stack it far higher than before — every consecutive hit increasing his speed, until his spear was moving faster than most of the monsters could react intime. He wove between targets and focused solely on landing successfull hits without caring about killing his opponents. Sometime the monsters died but most of the time they were left behind wounded for someone else to finish. Every one of those kills was pressure lifted off the rest of the group, whether he was the one closing it out or not.

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Amir still hadn't figured out how to fully control his own talent. The speed boost from Momentum Burst was more than his own body could keep up with when he let it run through him completely — he'd tried that early on and nearly put himself on the ground for it. So he'd adapted, using it in short, contained bursts instead of committing to it all at once, feeding the boost into just his arms right as he threw a strike. The result wasn't grace. It was a spear that arrived faster than anything watching him expected, closing a gap monsters assumed they still had time to react to. More often than not, they didn't. Unlike Matteo he focused on finishing off his opponents to level up faster. But the true reason was, that he could not reach the attacking speed of Matteo.

Alina Sokolov had spent the time since the Audimax getting to know her talent properly, and by now she was fairly sure it wasn't like anyone else's. It was called *Summon: Syphus*. While Julian could call up echoes of monsters he'd already killed, Alina's summon was something else entirely — a single, individual creature, not conjured from anything dead, closer to actually being alive than anything Julian ever brought out. It leveled the way a person did, through its own kills, and every time it landed one, the experience split cleanly in half between them. Right now it looked like a husky, lean and not yet especially dangerous — nowhere near strong enough to take on a monster by itself. But it didn't need to win fights outright to matter. It darted in low, bit down onto a leg, threw off a monster's balance, and bought Alina the openings they needed.

Fabian Lindt liked to joke that he was basically a walking refrigator, and for now, that wasn't far from the truth. *Once I'm actually strong,* he told himself, driving his spear into a monster's flank instead of doing anything more interesting with his talent, *I'll freeze them where they stand, put icicles through anything that gets close, do all the cool stuff.* Right now, *Freezing* barely lived up to any of that. All it could manage was a localized burst of bitter cold radiating out from his spear tip — useful mostly because monsters had no idea what to make of sudden, bone-deep cold in the middle of a fight, and the half-second of confusion it bought him was often the only real advantage it gave. Everything past that, he still had to earn with the spear itself.

Valerie Wagner fought with her spear like most of them did, but every so often, she'd let a monster get closer than it should have — close enough to slam into her instead of getting run through first. It looked reckless from the outside. It might have been. The moment of impact was exactly what her talent *Kinetic Absorption* needed, pulling the force of the hit into her own body instead of letting it knock her down, storing it up for a single counterstrike that landed far harder than anything her spear alone could have managed. She took a bruise or two for it more often than not. It was worth it but still very risky.

Rudolf’s group was not as effective as the others but between Rudolf's barrier, Matteo's speed, and the rest, Rudolf's people were pulling their weight, and the fight in front of the university was starting to look a little less impossible than it had before.