There are monsters deserving of sympathy. Creatures driven by hunger and savage instincts so potent their surrender to their baser nature is simply a foregone conclusion. Their only purpose to hunt, consu, and express their strength.
The Lithid was not one such monster. Its penchant for cruelty had been on ample display from the beginning. Still, even as I moved to help and witnessed what was done to it, illuminated by the sickly green light of life-magic turned against its innate purpose, there was a part of deep inside that couldn't help but wince.
A roar deafened us as another dark tentacle erged from the mass in the ceiling, curving forward like an irate serpent, and struck out towards Maya again.
Her mouth moved as she uttered sothing and extended an arm, nails of her fingertips pointed straight outward, illuminated and glowing. Like a raging river crashing into downstream rocks, the darkness split. Ribbonous remnants encircled her, weaving together like a wicker sphere before detonating.
The humanoid shadows it controlled froze in mid-step or mid-swing. mbers of my regint did the sa, unsure of what was happening and why.
Maya looked to . As smoke wreathed her shoulders and descended down her arm, forming a vicious curved black blade, there was sothing cold behind her eyes. Sothing brutal. A patient readiness that sohow suited her but was frightening all the sa.
Are you still so accepting?
I drew in a deep breath. Acrid air filled my lungs, and I bellowed. "The tide is turning! Press forward!"
Emboldened, the regint engaged with renewed ferocity as they pushed forward, singing steel cleaving shadows. Simultaneously, the enemy appeared to grow less coordinated, the Lithid's angry screeches raw and desperate as it abandoned its wide approach, narrowing its focus to a single person.
Zinn and Sevran flanked Maya, fighting off the onslaught. Every silhouette cut down in their vicinity was absorbed, adding to the shroud of smoke that frad Maya's shoulders.
"GIVE IT BACK!" The lithid scread in outrage, otherworldly wail echoing off the damp wall.
Maya grinned, and I imdiately realized that was the wrong choice of words. Shimring arrows of oil flew like rain, battering the lithid's physical manifestations wherever it appeared until it sunk beneath the sewage and resurfaced, only to be riddled with arrows again. Her voice carried, as if amplified by so unknown magic. "You're part of now. Your fear. Your terror. There is nowhere you can hide from ."
I traversed the battlefield from above, leaping from aegis to aegis and swinging at shadows until I landed ankle deep in the refuse beside them, beheading two of the shadow soldiers in a single swing.
"They're weaker than before. It's working!"
"Not fast enough." Maya sidestepped, her face a mask of focus, intercepting a barbed tendril aid for Zinn's torso. Now severed, it ford a spear, which she hurled at one of the Lithid's multiplying masses. "With hours to spare, the lithid would eventually die. But... it is vast. And even if I had the endurance, we do not have that sort of ti."
"What do you need?" I stomped on the back of a particularly large shadow soldier's knee, driving it to the ground before it could attack us from behind. Maya called an oily arrow straight down, and I felt the displacent of air as it pierced straight through its form, rippling the sewage below.
"The core. We have to destroy it."
"Okay. How the hells do we do that?"
Maya looked out, beyond the clash of soldiers and shadows, to the edge of the battle. "The sa way you win five-cup-diamond."
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The na struck a bell. It was a rchant's ga, often used as a promotion to draw in custors and entice business. The rchant would seat himself at a table in front of his stall, cart, or establishnt. Once soone took him up on the "ga," a single spherical gemstone was passed between several stone cups at rapid pace, sotis five, though the number often varied. More importantly, the ga itself was a scam. No rchant could afford to give away a precious gem to even a fraction of the potential winners. Either the gem itself was spirited away in the shuffle, discretely scooped up or rolled off the table at the last possible mont, or the rchant had a thod of transporting the gem between vessels before they were overturned, through magic or so other thod.
Thus, the only way to win five-cup-diamond was to potentially lose it. Overturn all cups on the table and openly expose the rchant as a fraud—in which case the gem was often paid as recompense for silence, the best possible outco—or find yourself with a yet-to-be-moved gem, and a very unhappy rchant.
"Got it. Where are our cups?"
Grimly, Maya pointed towards the edge of the battlefield, where heaping piles of darkness spat out shadow soldiers who continually split, half rushing forward, the other half taking up defensive positions around the towering heaps. Almost imdiately, I understood what to do.
"Sera, Mari! To !" I shouted, pointing out targets on either side as I rushed towards the center.
Flanked by around a dozen soldiers apiece, they followed suit, rushing towards the shadowy masses and cleaving them with sword and axe. Sera took longer than the axe-wielding banner lieutenant, as like , she couldn't rely on the magic she typically would have for fear of detonating even more explosions. I felled the soldiers surrounding mine first, tearing open and finding nothing that resembled a core.
Monts later, Sera and Mari did the sa.
Right. Five-cup. It cheats, moves its core between vessels.
We'd narrowed down the possibilities significantly. But in doing so, we'd tipped our hand. The lithid would be more cautious and quick to react. Any second now it would recall defenses to the mounds of bubbling darkness, making the task twice as hard.
There were two remaining on the far left and right. I pushed mana through the inscriptions on my legs, muscle and mana coiling as one, torn between which direction to choose. The pile I'd ripped open had already started to bubble up and re-manifest. If I chose the wrong one, we'd be back where we started, arguably worse.
"Right!" Maya's voice echoed over the battle, her shout barely audible over the din. But I heard it.
I shot forward, everything blurring around as my legs burned from the effort. Bypassing the shadows entirely, I tightened my two-handed grip and brought the borrowed blade down artlessly in an axeman's swing, leveraging all my strength, intending to cleave it in two.
TING
My bones rattled as the impact jarred through , spinning tal of the broken blade whirling off to the side. Unlike the previous heap, I'd struck sothing solid. I dug my fingers into the oily flesh and pulled, trying to get a better look at my quarry. A glowing violet sphere radiated from within the mass, pulsing. It was, as Maya predicted, a core. They were relatively uncommon. I'd only seen a few of them—and those were dun cores already expended after the monster died. Once the impossibly hard exterior was cracked open, the inside was soft and nut-like, a surprisingly decent source of protein.
Amplifying my efforts with mana and the natural strength of my chitinous arm, I bashed the glowing core with the hilt of my broken blade, over and over, barely dodging beneath the shadowy blade of an attacker before the soldiers backing up repositioned to better protect .
Even with all that effort, the orb remained untarnished, perfectly spherical and whole. Worse, it seed to retreat into the cradling darkness, sinking into the surface. If I didn't figure out a way to solve the imperability issue, we'd be in more dire straits than where we started. Short of summoning the fla and immolating myself in the impending explosion, I tried everything I could think of. Pressurized blades of water prepared by air, striking it with the blade of the already broken sword, even just squeezing it in my fist.
"Cairn!" Sera shouted. She'd rotated over to help Mari, who was being assailed by shadows attempting to overwhelm her with a sheer force of numbers. "We're too spread out! If we remain here, we will be overrun."
She was right. There were seconds to spare, maybe less. Even then, we were too entrenched. A fighting retreat out of this level of commitnt would cause casualties.
I stared down at the sphere. Having a core ant it was more monster than demon, and mana was a monster's lifeblood. With forms that often defied the rule of nature, most simply couldn't subsist without it. Given that, there was still sothing I hadn't tried. It was insane, the equivalent of trying to absorb a waterfall with a canteen, and would probably get killed, but people were going to start dying soon, regardless.
It was worth a shot.
Moving quickly, I snatched the core with my demonic gauntlet and pulled. A radiating vastness that dwarfed oceans flooded through , sending pulsing waves of power through my spine.
Everything went white.
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