Page 65

Emily sits on a rock in the darkness, contemplating the coming fight.

I have to let some people die, but it matters who. Ivor can’t die for obvious reasons, same with Enzo and Dante. I should make sure Oscar survives so I still get paid properly after this, and I owe Callum for his help with understanding space, so I’ll keep him and Cian alive.

She raises a hand to her mouth, biting her thumb as she taps her foot and stares into the ether.

I should make sure we don’t lose Matteo since he’s one of the three of us who can damage the monster, and I should keep the casualties among barrier mages and healers low. I can lose one or two, but that’s pushing it.

She sees a flicker of heat creep around the corner, approaching the group at last, and stands up while calling: “Light!”

Two golden orbs of light shoot to the ceiling, illuminating the cave and revealing the prepared mages lying in wait. Emily makes eye contact with the monster, holding its unsettling gaze as she waits for it to start its slaughter. The creature snarls in anger as it sinks into the floor, and Emily grabs a nearby stalagmite for stability.

The violent shaking begins, and the group is thrown into disarray. Emily scans through everyone’s hiding places, waiting for the sacrifices to die. Suddenly, the ground below Ricardo bursts open as the monster’s gnarled claws rip up through him. He’s split in half, from groin to shoulder in an instant, raining a crimson flood on the creature as it rises fully from the ground.

One down.

Emily watches quietly, carefully observing the creature’s every move to try to predict its movements. It turns from the corpse of the weak luggage carrier and leaps between two stalactites hanging from the roof, digging its claws into the stone to hold on as it corrects its angle and leaps again. It drops onto Bianca, pinning her to the floor as it clasps her head and slowly drives its thumbs through her eye sockets. Her pained shrieks are quickly ended, and the monster drops her corpse before glancing around and sinking into the floor again.

Two down.

The shaking slowly begins to reduce, allowing Emily to release her support and walk into the open to have a clearer view. She spots the monster a moment later, her eyes finding Maeve when she screams out as the monster rips her right arm off. It casts aside the limb before stabbing its hand through her stomach and ripping out her intestines.

Three down.

The monster turns on its heels, crouching low and springing in a sudden leap at the nearest mage, Cian, before the shaking can finally stop.

Damn.

Emily frowns as the creature bites into Cian’s throat and rips it clean out.

I’ll see who else it kills before resetting. Hopefully, it will attack different people if I swap some of their positions.

The monster leaps back up to some stalactites, rotating its head around to locate any moving people. Seeing a change, Emily calls out.

“Cormac, slow it down!”

He follows orders, leaning out from behind his rock cover and pointing his hand at the monster as a flickering black magic circle forms before him. Instantly, the creature’s focus snaps to him, and it leaps down from the ceiling. It springs forward, closing the distance to Cormac and slamming its hand into his head. Cormac cries out in pain, the magic circle he’s been forming breaking to pieces as he loses focus.

The monster catches him with its other hand, raising him to eye level and slowly applying force to either side of his skull. Cormac struggles, kicking and scratching frantically at the beast as unbearable pain floods his system. After a few moments, his skull pops, spraying blood from his features as his limbs fall like a puppet with its strings cut.

“Let’s try this again,” Emily mutters, activating The Clock.

***

Once again sitting waiting for the monster to appear, the group are spread through the cave in a slightly different order. The creature approaches and ignores Emily once again, diving into the floor and starting the shaking chaos.

Maeve is the first to die, ripped to shreds to commence the massacre.

Next falls Oscar.

Again.

The Clock runs backwards.

***

Ivor is eviscerated; The Clock runs back.

***

Cormac is split in two.

One down.

Mia is disembowelled.

Two down.

Linda has her brain pierced through her eyes.

Three down.

Fionn has his arms ripped off.

Four down. Shit, that’s one barrier and one healer gone.

Matteo gets his throat ripped out.

Fuck!

The Clock rewinds.

***

Emily stands, staring at the approaching monster with a firm scowl set on her face.

“I swear to Goddess. If I have to live this boring fucking day one more time, I’m just killing five people myself,” she mutters quietly before calling for light.

The monster springs into action, swimming through the ground and shaking the cave. It bursts from the ground, ripping Bianca in half.

One down.

Then, it leaps away and carves out the insides of Ricardo’s skull.

Two down.

Next, it tears Nora’s throat out with its teeth, causing one of the orbs of light floating above to dissipate.

Three down.

The creature sinks into the floor again, and Emily hopefully scans the room for its next target. The wall behind Linda ripples, and a grey streak bursts out, cleaving her head from her torso in one go.

Four down. Poor girl, at least that was the most painless death I’ve seen it give.

The shaking subsides, but a few mages are still scrambling back to their hiding spots as the monster finishes its swift kills. Its head swivels, looking for a new target, and Emily holds her breath hopefully. It springs into motion, grabbing Cormac and lifting him as it crushes his head again.

Five down. Finally!

With a relieved sigh, Emily pulls out her revolver, already loaded with her specialised bullets. The black gun crackles with machina and kicks back hard as a searing hot bullet flies into the creature’s spine. It screeches, biting a chunk out of Cormac’s corpse before dropping him and turning to face Emily with a sneer. Predictably, it leaps for her, and she ducks to the side to avoid it, slashing out with a Claw as she does.

“Matteo! Dante! Burn the bodies! Everyone else, follow the plan!” Emily yells as she parries a slash of the monster’s claws.

Murmured chants fill the cave as the mages go on the offensive. Matteo and Dante both locate the bodies of their companions and aim blasts of fire at them, burning their flesh to ash. Meanwhile, Bella and Oscar surround Emily with barriers of wind and water, tightly wrapping her clothes in a protective sheen of armour. Callum, Cian, and Maeve gather the dropped spatial bags of their companions and hide at the edge of the cave, careful not to be spotted by the monster.

Emily holsters her pistol and distracts the creature, ducking and weaving between its attacks. Any attacks that get too close to her meet the resistance of her Claws or the two barriers, giving Emily the extra fraction of a second she needs to avoid them. Their clash ends in a stalemate after a few exchanges, but as the creature keeps endlessly slashing, gnawing and leaping at her, she silently prepares a spell.

A pulsing blade of water impacts the creature’s head, knocking it to the side but otherwise not harming it. The monster turns towards Erin, snarling at her and revealing an opening to Emily.

She releases a bolt at point-blank range into the monster’s leg, scorching its skin. It screeches and turns back to her, restarting their previous engagement. She begins casting another bolt while holding off the monster’s frenzied attacks.

“Ready!” Matteo calls out from somewhere behind the monster.

Emily grins, activating a light grenade still attached to the bandolier with her machina, causing it to detach, and flicking it up between herself and the monster. She sends a small stream of mana into her earrings and shuts her eyes as the cave fills with light and sound.

She opens her eyes the moment the light fades and sees the creature howling in anger with a burning patch on its back. Utilising its distracted state, Emily pulls out her revolver again and fires two charged shots into the newly burning flesh as it turns to look for Matteo. It turns back to face her, leaping forward again, and Emily drops into a roll, holstering her gun as she does, and passing under the creature.

As she skids back onto her feet, she notices the brown glow covering the monster completely as it furiously snarls at her.

Perfect! Now for stage two!

Emily continues dodging the monster’s attacks, fighting back as much as she can against the stronger and faster opponent. Tentacles of water reach out from the barrier surrounding her, courtesy of Mia. The tentacles wrap around the creature and pull against its barrier, draining its mana slowly. Matteo and Erin keep sending a rain of fire and water against it, and Emily uses every chance she can to slash apart the barrier with her machina-charged Claws, pushing them to the limits with Overdrive, and finding them surprisingly effective at damaging pure mana barriers.

The onslaught of attacks continues for a while until the mages start to run out of mana.

“I’m out,” Matteo shouts, panting with exhaustion and collapsing to the floor behind his cover.

“Me too,” Mia calls.

“Same,” Erin joins in.

“I can only block two more attacks,” Bella shouts with slight panic.

“I have five left at least,” Oscar says with a slight quiver, unable to hold a touch of panic from his voice.

Emily rolls to the side to avoid a leap and pants slightly as she makes a decision, the stress of the intense battle taking its toll.

“Dante, start now, I’ll try to finish off its mana,” she yells, blasting the creature with a bolt.

Dante starts a long, complicated chant, and a large, burning red magic circle slowly forms behind him, pulsing with heat and power as dozens of runes and geometric shapes wind around each other. Emily glances at her Claws, seeing dents and scratches covering them, and several tears in the bracers.

Time to play with explosives.

She retracts the Claws, reaching up and grabbing a mana grenade, charging it full of machina. She pulls a bullet from a pouch at her waist with the other hand, pouring in a small amount of spatial mana, to bypass switch’s touch requirement, before flicking it behind the monster as it swipes its claws at her again. She quickly prepares switch while calculating the bullet's position. The moment it reaches far enough and is perfectly concealed by the monster’s body, she uses her machina to activate the grenade with a shortened fuse and casts her spell.

A purple glow envelopes the grenade, and it vanishes, a bullet appearing in her hand instead. The grenade detonates, catching the monster in its blast radius but avoiding Emily. Its brown barrier flickers and dims slightly, and the creature howls in anger.

Its attacks increase further in intensity, and it quickly removes the last of Emily’s defensive help from her teammates. She starts trading injuries for bolts and well-placed grenades, using switch to make sure the creature only ever sees the light grenades go off, wearing down the monster’s barrier slowly. Her body armour plates are chipped and dented in return, with some gashes appearing on her skin through the gaps between, and one of her boots has the spikes ripped off the bottom from a bad collision with the creature’s claws.

“Ready!” Dante calls at last, after a few minutes of preparation that have left Emily alone against the beast.

Hearing his signal, Emily starts the final barrage. She baits her antagonist so it leaps for her, then leans back and tosses her last light grenade up so the monster passes under it. It bursts with a shocking pop, the loud sound causing the creature a moment of disorientation that sends it tumbling to the ground as it fails to land properly.

She grabs her last two mana grenades, charging them full of machina and tossing them into the air on either side of the creature while hoping they don’t harm her too much. The monster sees the mana grenades, but doesn’t dive into the floor, only registering them as light grenades. She raises her hands before her, the crackling cerulean magic circle of bolt forming in the air as she fills it with as much mana as possible.

Got you! I hope this is enough. I only have a couple of bolts left in me after this.

Thunderous sound fills the cave as two grenades and one spell go off at the same time. The glowing hot fragments of metal from the grenades whizz past, several digging into the monster’s barrier, and two hitting Emily in the leg and left bicep, punching small holes clean through.

Shit! They missed the bones at least.

The monster howls in anger, looking far worse for wear. The brown sheen covering it has faded to a barely perceptible flicker. Its skin is covered in small cuts and scratches, trickling blood from most of its body, with several patches of black burned skin flaking off.

Emily glances at Enzo and Ivor, seeing both of them with their eyes shut and their hands pressed to the floor, sweat dripping from their foreheads as they focus.

They aren’t out of mana yet, but they definitely stopped it from diving then. I hope they can hold through Dante’s attack.

As if reading her mind, Dante activates the magic circle in front of him, releasing undulating waves of power. The air around it twists, as burning red petals of fire form in the air, being pulled to the centre in a swirling vortex of flames. The monster senses the large gathering of mana and starts turning towards the source, but Emily quickly pulls out her revolver with her uninjured arm, charging it with machina and sending three shots into their attacker. The powerful kickback strains her wrist, but Emily ignores it and fires a fourth shot as the creature leaps at her. The fourth shot misses as she twists to dodge its swipe, so Emily drops the gun and slaps her palm against the monster’s side while casting bolt again.

She rolls away as electricity flows across its skin, before skidding to her feet and turning to watch the fireworks. The vortex of fire before Dante compresses, forming a sharply pointed giant flower of crimson aiming straight at the creature. With a single loud burst of force, the flower rockets forward, instantly drawing a glowing line between Dante and the monster. It tries to dive into the floor to escape, but Enzo and Ivor pour the last of their energy into blocking its attempt.

The flower hits the monster’s chest, engulfing it in a raging inferno as it bursts. Emily sees the initial impact shatter the monster’s barrier, then the creature disappears in a blast of red. The sound of the explosion echoes off the cave walls, reverberating around and filling the space with its power. Emily feels grateful for her earrings as she feels the thunderous vibrations deep in her chest.

Dante collapses in exhaustion before the fire can fade, too drained to even look at the aftermath of his attack. Ivor and Enzo fall with him, leaving Emily alone as the last combat-capable mage.

Please be enough.

The smoke and fire slowly fade, revealing a scorched black figure standing in the centre of a small crater. Emily takes a step forward and then pauses as she sees two glassy white eyes snap open, staring back at her with unbridled fury.

Emily throws aside her tattered robes, lifting her hands out to the sides and extending the Claws.

“Fine. I said I’d tear you limb from limb. Let’s do this,” she snarls as she advances.

A glowing cerulean magic circle forms around her as her arms ignite with the crackle of machina. The monster growls and lowers its injured body to pounce, and Emily breaks into a sprint to meet it.