He fell, stumbled, caught his balance, and ran the rest of the way to the far wall, touching its side and stepping up onto the ledge at roughly the same time the others did.
“Damn,” gasped Leonis, releasing Nezzar and sweeping his hand back through his sweat-matted locks. “No more sprinting!”
“Gah!” Lianshi slid down the wall and leaned her head back. “Too close. That would have been a massacre with Cinder-level darkvision.”
“Almost was, even with ours,” said Leonis. “Scorio? You all right?”
“Another cut,” he said, studying his leg. A laceration across the belly of his calf. How had it cut the back of his leg, but not gone through the rest of it? “It’s fine.”
“You’re going to fall apart at his rate,” said Lianshi, pushing off the wall to crawl over and tear the lower half of his pant leg off. She bound it around the wound tightly, then rapped his knee. “Stop getting hurt.”
“Easy for you to say, Miss Test Subject,” he said with a tired grin.
“I’m just getting this far because you all are doing the heavy lifting.” She pushed herself to standing and turned to the next dark door. “All right, room number ten. Some kind of elite fight, I’m guessing. I vote we take a good ten minutes to gather our strength then press on.”
“Seconded,” said Leonis, leaning his head back against the wall and closing his eyes.
“Thirded,” said Naomi, who’d shrunk back to her human form, and lay down on her back where she draped an arm over her face. “Maybe make that an hour.”
“How are you holding up?” asked Lianshi, moving alongside her.
“Blood loss, is all.” Naomi didn’t shift her arm. “Feeling a little light-headed. And it hurts, obviously. And my leg is starting to act up on me. But otherwise doing great.”
“She must be worse off than we thought if she’s being funny,” said Leonis, tone grave. “Perhaps we shouldn’t wait that long.”
“Five minutes.” Scorio rested his badly burned arms gently atop his knees. “Just a moment to catch our breath. Then the next fight.”
Again they rested, the silence broken only by their breathing, and when Scorio realized how tempted he was to doze he forced himself to stand. “And that’s plenty of time. Up, everyone. We’ve random horrors to slaughter.”
“I miss our apartment,” said Lianshi. “Our bathing pool. My bed.”
“I miss the ruins,” said Naomi, slowly climbing to her feet, voice a little slurred. “How hospitable and lovely they are. The charming wildlife.”
“All right, now we really need to hurry,” said Leonis, staring at her in concern.
“What?” protested Naomi. “I’m… I’m being funny.”
“Exactly,” said Leonis.
“I’ll go first,” said Lianshi. “But this will most likely be a big fight like the end of the Char series. Don’t take long coming after me.”
“We won’t,” said Scorio, pouring Coal mana into his reservoir again. “Play it safe till we’re all there.”
She nodded, gathered her hair, flipped it behind one shoulder, then strode through the archway, chin lowered.
“I’m next,” said Leonis, tone weary, almost mechanical, and with Nezzar appearing in his hand, its runes burning brightly, he strode after her.
“You go last,” said the Nightmare Lady, who towered over him again, tail whipping from side to side. “Bad off as I am, you’re worse.”
“How about we go together?” And before she could protest, Scorio stepped into the darkness.
After the stark spaces they had fought through with their bleak illumination, the next chamber was startling. A mass of plinths filled the round chamber, each bedecked with an identical golden statue, slender and with articulated joints, a curved blade in each hand. The lighting was rich, roseate, seeming to come through invisible drapes so that some areas were suffused with warm illumination, others gradating to velvet shadow. The ceiling was high above them, barely visible, and the ground between the plinths covered in layered carpets that muffled their steps.
They all stood, frozen against the iron segment of curving wall through which they’d stepped. Too many statues, though Scorio in alarm. We can’t fight that many.
There had to be nearly fifty of them on the plinths of assorted height. They stood in different poses, some attacking, others in deep, defensive crouches, some lightly balanced on the balls of their feet as if in readiness, others in postures of all-out runs.
None of them moved. All of them gleamed like sunken treasure espied through murky water.
Each and every one of them was identicaclass="underline" perhaps five feet tall, their forms vaguely feminine, their heads topped with an ornate diadem in which rubies were embedded. A central emerald was placed in their brow, but their eyes were lost to curling latticework that swept down from their temples to flank their noses, the dark spaces between the filigree revealing their heads to be hollow.
And they weren’t entirely made of gold, either; their joints shone with steel parts, from their shoulders to their segmented fingers about the hilts of their blades. They stood like dancers awaiting the first strains of music that would sweep them to life, into a balletic performance that could only result in blood.
“Thoughts?” asked Leonis, breaking the silence.
“Reminds me of the Old Gauntlet,” said Scorio. “Where only a few would come to life, or as many as the number of contestants.”
“Yes.” Naomi had crossed in her Nightmare Lady form. “I think you’re right. This would be a surprise to any who hadn’t done what we’d done.”
“Then…?” Lianshi sighed. “I guess I’ll walk through and wait to get attacked?”
“Take point,” said Scorio, “but don’t go so far that we can’t come to your aid.”
“Sure.” Lianshi pushed away from the wall and passed, hesitatingly, between the first plinths. The golden statues, ornate and imperial, lithe and strangely horrifying, remained utterly still.
Scorio watched, breath bated, as Lianshi did a slow loop about the plinths closest to them, her gaze flickering from side to side, her breathing light, rapid, superficial.
“A little deeper, then,” said Scorio when she returned. “We’ll all press in a bit with you.”
Which they did; leaving the wall, they took a dozen steps into the large room, and then waited as Lianshi did another lap, a broad curve which brought her close to the center of the room.
“There!” shouted the Nightmare Lady, pointing off to the side. Scorio barely had time to catch an uncoiling of limbs, one of the statues bending its knees slightly before it flicked itself up into a preposterous leap like that of a grasshopper, sudden, blurringly fast. Lianshi spun, searching for the opponent, but raised her iridescent shield regardless, and that saved her life.
The statue dropped down soundlessly behind her, the carpets absorbing the sound of its golden feet, and stabbed Lianshi in the side with one blade as it hewed the other across her neck.
Lianshi recoiled, unhurt, and the golden face registered no emotion at its attack’s failure. Instead, it leaped again, a sudden, mechanical burst of flight that carried it somersaulting into the air to land deeper in the room amidst the other plinths and statues.
Scorio rushed up beside Lianshi, breathing deeply, the pain in his side throbbing, his arms feeling like their flesh had been replaced with live coals. Leonis held Nezzar at the ready, while the Nightmare Lady leaped atop a tall plinth close by and hung off the immobile statue, peering in the direction their foe had gone.
“I can probably see her,” she said. “But she’s standing still. There are several empty plinths. All she needs to do is stand on one and she’ll blend in.”
“Great,” said Leonis. “Given how fast it moves, how are we going to catch it?”
“Here’s an idea,” said Scorio, stepping to a low plinth with its accompanying statue. He placed his hand on its shoulder, painfully aware of the twin blades, and shoved.