The boar crashed into her at full tilt, tossing its heads as it did so. Tusks slammed into Lianshi’s side, but instead of sending her flying, the whole beast slammed to a standstill before her gleaming form. Tusks shattered; the beast’s mass rippled up to swell its neck at the sudden arrest of its momentum. It stepped back, blinking its eyes dazedly, to stare in confusion at Lianshi who was slowly lowering her arms.
Unhurt.
But that had been all the distraction the Nightmare Lady had needed. She appeared for a moment above the boar, knees tucked into her chest, chin lowered, somersaulting right over its broad shoulders, spinning so that her tail whipped down and around, its triangular blade passing over the the beast’s back.
Then Leonis was there, doing a stutter-step run that culminated in his swinging Nezzar two-handed up and into the boar’s chin, rotating from the hips, the runes bleeding behind into the air as the club’s tip crashed into the fiend’s jaw.
Its head snapped up, the architecture of its face shifting and collapsing upon itself, tender skin splitting, the last of its tusks shattering.
The Nightmare Lady landed on the far side, arrested her slide by slamming her claws into the stone, then hauled herself back at the boar’s flank even as it reared up onto its rear legs in agony.
Scorio lost sight of her then, saw Leonis swing Nezzar again, the club impacting the boar’s shoulder. It looked like he was attacking a boulder, but even from where he stood Scorio heard the distinct crack of bone snapping, and the huge forelimb suddenly fell limp.
But the fiend was impossibly strong. Even with black blood sheeting down its chest and past its ribs, with its head looking like a stepped-on peach, and its shoulder collapsed, it wheeled on the Nightmare Lady and slammed its head into her chest.
Her reflexes were sharp; even as the blow came, the Nightmare Lady sprang away, but not quite in time; the shattered remnants of a tusk caught her by the hip, and turned her agile escape into a cartwheeling fall through the air.
Leonis fell back, swung Nezzar before him in a warning sweep, the air moaning once more, then hurled himself aside as the boar fiend reared up and crashed down upon where he’d stood with all the force and fury of a cresting storm wave.
Scorio’s reservoir reached saturation. He inhaled gratefully, willed his Heart to incandesce, and as the boar fiend cast around, eyes blood-shot, black blood and snot leaking from between its jaws and the deep funnel-like holes in its snout, Scorio stepped to the fore.
“Hey,” he called out, raising his good hand to gesture at the huge pig. “Over here, ugly. It’s my turn.”
The beast swayed, propping its weight up on its sole good leg, then let out a whinnying cry and bounded at him, several thousand pounds of muscle and ruined tusks.
Scorio exerted his will, and black scales swept out across his arms, white-hot talons spring from the tips of his fingers, and wicked power suffused his body. Feeling elastic, limber, barely constrained by the ties of gravity, Scorio crouched, waited till the last moment, then sprang forth to meet the boar.
But first, he feinted, raised his clawed hand high as if he were going for the fiend’s eyes, then ducked down and threw himself into a slide, twisting to hit the stones on his back and pass under the charging boar’s head.
A flash of its broad chest passing overhead, into which he sank his talons with a vicious slash. Hide and muscles parted at his touch, the swathe of pectoral muscle coming undone with a stench of burned flesh.
Momentum carried the boar on, but with its chest ruined, it couldn’t bring its remaining foreleg to bear; with a cry it crashed down to the flagstones, slamming into the stone with enough force to wrench its heads sideways, causing it to turn as it slid so that it ended up perpendicular to where Scorio rose to his feet.
“Mine!” cried out the Nightmare Lady. She leaped atop its uppermost shoulder as it heaved, and slammed her tail blade down to impale it through the throat.
Its guttural roar grew wet, turned into a gargle, then with a final shiver, it lay still.
Scorio immediately released his scaled form and rose into a crouch, arms resting on his knees. “Everyone all right?”
“Fine,” said Lianshi, with a grimace. “Though I’m covered in pig spit.”
“Fine,” said Leonis, sitting off to the side, Nezzar set down beside him as he tended the now crimson bandage wrapped around his thigh. “That was… close.”
“Fine,” said the Nightmare Lady, leaping off the boar. But when she landed, she staggered before catching her balance.
“It hit you hard,” said Scorio, tone sober. “You sure?”
“Fine,” said the Nightmare Lady, her sulfurous green eyes narrowing. “Just a glancing blow.”
But the wound across her prominent pelvic cradle was torn and welling black blood.
“I’m sorry, everyone,” said Scorio. “It took me too long to get into the fight. My Heart…”
Leonis climbed to his feet. “Don’t worry about it. We’ve soundly crushed every obstacle thus far. It makes sense that we’d start to take a few nicks and cuts.”
“We’re supposed to crush every obstacle of this section,” said Naomi as she shrank down to her human form. “The first five rooms are Char killers. As Emberlings, we’re performing a little worse than expected.”
“Next five are designed to defeat Cinders,” said Lianshi, giving up on the slime that caked her robes. “Should be interesting.”
It was a question Scorio had put off asking for as long as he could, but now he couldn’t hold it back. “How far do you think Jova will go?”
“As a Tomb Spark?” Naomi turned to consider him, hand pressed to the wound on her hip. “She should pass the first fifteen rooms without too much difficulty. I’d guess eighteen rooms or so?”
“I didn’t need to hear that,” said Leonis, releasing Nezzar so that it faded from view. “We’re only five in. Can we work on keeping our morale up?”
“Come on, you big complainer,” said Lianshi, giving him a mock-shove as she passed him by. “Let’s see what the next room contains. Should be some kind of trap, right?”
“Right,” said Scorio, rising to his feet as well. “Just let me collect my Coal mana again.”
They moved to stand before the black door that had appeared in one of the hexagon’s walls, and there waited till Scorio gave them all a firm nod.
“I’ll go first,” said Lianshi. “I’ll activate my gift to foil whatever trap awaits us.” She took a deep breath, squared her shoulders, and Scorio felt her Heart incandesce a moment before she stepped through.
Naomi, pale-faced, shifted up into her Nightmare Lady form and stepped through right after. Scorio ignited his Heart as Leonis summoned Nezzar back, and with a grim nod to his friend stepped forward.
Through the black door, through that jolt of nothingness, to step out into a complex, cramped room filled with movement and violence. Scorio immediately pressed himself back against the wall, his chest tightening as he took in the chaos and complexity of the small—room? chamber?—before them.
The walls were animated, divided into huge blocks of gray stone that ground slowly toward each other, extruding themselves, growing into rectangles that would suddenly and without warning slam forward to crash against their opposite. A crooked path shifted constantly between these slamming blocks, the far wall only some twenty feet away, but the means to get there constantly slamming shut at different points, with the blocks then slowly receding toward their native wall to only reverse course and slam back out again.
“By the ten hells,” said Leonis. “How are we supposed to navigate that?”
“It’s just a variation,” called the Nightmare Lady over the cacophony. “Like the room with sliding blades.”