Alexandra stopped its raised foot on a slab of gold. Calypso drove her axe haft beneath the knee, and a second barrier formed against the back of the leg to stop it bending.
"Can you hold it there, Caly?" Alexandra asked through her teeth.
"For you? Of course!"
Kaiden fed fortification through Alexandra’s bond and escalation through Calypso’s, keeping Lust running as he hacked through the tendons of the opposite leg. The boss’s weight lurched toward the limb pinned by the two women.
Calypso levered the trapped knee upward against Alexandra’s barriers, rolling the Sovereign’s chest toward Bastet and exposing the scorched plates.
The felinid’s smile widened. White fire gathered between her palms, bright enough that the Ninth had to turn their faces away.
"Master, this may get warm."
Bastet blasted the exposed underside with a torrent of solar flame. The outer shell ran down its belly in glowing streams, and the flesh beneath ruptured in the heat.
"GGRRRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAKH!!"
Kaiden felt the blast against his back as he stepped clear of the leg. Alexandra curved a shield around him and Calypso, letting them attack while Bastet burned the armor off above their heads.
Aria’s moonlight lances punched through the softened plates. Alice fired between them, her golden beams boring into the channels leading from the chest to the crown.
"A little higher, little sis!" Aria called. "I’ll open it for you!"
"I see it!" Alice’s halo flared as her beam followed Aria’s lance through the same wound.
The two lights tore a hole through the base of the vent crown.
"Coming through!" Nyx called, and hurled Luna along the opening they had made.
The Storm Valkyrie dissolved into lightning in midair. Kaiden poured speed down her bond as she struck the breach, and the thunderclap threw water away from the Sovereign in a ring.
Lightning burst from every vent connected to the wound. Stone barrels exploded, scattering burning fragments across the terrace while Luna tore through the crown and reformed on the armored ridge behind it.
"Hahaha! Again, Fatty!"
"After we kill it, bestie."
"Well, that’s pointless then!"
Violet afterimages crawled across the Ninth’s vision. One fighter’s spear had dipped into the water while he watched the ridge where Luna had reappeared.
"They shot her through it," he whispered.
"She went through the boss..."
"The others opened it for her." The captain could see the molten hole in its chest, the crossed light burning inside it.
"How the hell do you fight that?" The spearman faced his captain. "Who do you even go for? The healer breaks your weapons. The demon catches you. The pink-haired one throws a woman made of lightning at your head!"
The captain had been awed by their power on the climb. Now, watching Alexandra release one barrier only when Calypso had secured her grip, he felt that awe deepen into disbelief.
Every time the Sovereign tried to escape one of them, another was waiting where it fled.
"You’d need a team that can match all of them," he muttered, gripping his spear tighter. "We’d be dead before we worked out who we were supposed to be fighting."
Down at the cordon, Kira had both hands pressed over her mouth. Rika leaned toward the production console, staring at the live feed.
"Please tell me we got all of that."
"Every feed," her sister whispered through her fingers. "We got every feed."
On the sixth terrace, the boss tried to rear away from Bastet’s fire. Calypso hauled on the trapped leg, Alexandra held her barriers around its knee, and Kaiden drove his greatsword through the tendons behind the other.
The Sovereign crashed down onto its elbows with its ruined face in front of him.

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