No creeping caution. No slow decline.
He was a Tomb Spark now. He would wield that might like a sledgehammer. He’d punch through whatever came his way or die trying.
The seventeenth chamber was a broad hallway, the air lambent with fluid light as if he were underwater. A subtle resistance worked against him, a pressure that constrained his movement.
Scorio stood still, back to the wall, chest heaving as he summoned his Heart. He went to reach for mana right as a great azure creature manifested beside him, shaped like a roughly circular rug, a wicked, spiny tail like a switch trailing behind. It streamed through the air, twin black eyes set in subtle ridges atop its upper side, and with a flurry it banked and swam away, bringing its tail to bear, whipping it through the unctuous air.
Instinct. Scorio swept Coal into his Heart and summoned his shroud just as a razor-sharp line of invisible force slashed against it. The parts that exceeded the shroud’s breadth cut past him, nicking the corner of his elbow, passing through flesh and bone as if they were a dream.
The shroud devoured the wisps of Coal in less than a second and disappeared.
Scorio filled his Heart with Iron and ran forth, straining against the resistance. With painful slowness he powered forward, sinking into that glimmering underwater domain, his weight lessened, the sensation such that he half-expected the ceiling to be the undulating, glimmering top of a tank.
More of the huge, strangely flattened beasts appeared in the ephemeral air; they faded in and out of sight, but each lashed at him with its tail as he struggled to run past them. The resistance infuriated him; he bared his teeth and strove for traction against the stone floor. Powered through, swinging his mantle back and forth, blocking slashes of invisible force mere moments before they would have gutted him.
The floor and walls behind him weren’t so fortunate; they were soon scored by deep gashes, a testament to the lethality of the attacks.
And then the creatures started swimming in behind him.
Cursing, Scorio slowed, considered trying to kill them. But he couldn’t even tell how many there were; they appeared and faded away as if swimming through columns of light.
No—he had to make the far wall. He plunged on, his Heart burning brightly, Iron venting furiously through the fractures, the shroud devouring what remained with horrific speed. The tender resistance in the air was just enough to reduce him to a strained jog. A flash of movement behind him, and he swung his shroud around, blocking the attack. A trickle of the force cut got past the bottom of the shield, however, and slashed through his foot. Another frantic flurry as a second beast banked and swam away as if affronted, and again Scorio brought his shroud around, parried the blast.
The wall was almost there. Slicked in sweat, gasping for breath, his muscles burning, he strove to reach it, shroud swinging about him as more attacks concentrated upon him.
And then his Heart died. How long had it lasted—ten seconds? Maybe less? It felt like an hour.
The creatures seemed to sense his weakness. They converged on him, emerging from their invisible realm to form a cyclone of swimming, flattened bodies about his own. Growling, his scales gone, his talons vanished, Scorio reached for the far wall. Sensed the azure fiends coordinate their attacks, their bodies as one pulling away, bodies rippling in a frantic explosion of activity, a score of barbed tails ripping around and unleashing their attacks.
So close. If he leaped, he just might make it, a tenuous chance, his need fever bright, his impatience clamping him like a fist—
But at the very last moment, he curbed his desire and dropped to the ground, falling flat, having to throw himself against the subtle resistance, a convulsive movement that slammed him against the stone as the force cuts flew over him.
The cyclone of flattened fiends fell apart, segments of their rug-like bodies falling away slowly, inky blood suffusing the air. Pain lashed across Scorio’s own body; he felt cuts etch themselves deeply across his back, his shoulders, his scalp; it felt like he’d taken a dozen lashes all at once, laying open his flesh, flaying him to the bone.
He wanted to lie there, tensed up, unable to scream, but instinct gripped him by the throat, worked his limbs as if he were a marionette, and with a terrible, frantic scramble he lurched forward and through the black archway as it appeared.
Eighteenth room. Or was it the nineteenth? Scorio didn’t know. The pain swamped him as if live, burning filaments of living flame worked deep into his flesh. He continued crawling, unable to stop moving forward, and then stopped, momentum abandoning him at last.
The hallway before him spun, or different segments of it did. It was divided into five bands, each a pentagon, each spinning slowly in a different direction at a variable speed, and on each, bonded to a side by localized gravity, stood a foe.
The result was like looking down into a grinder, some hellish contraption meant to turn flesh into meal.
Each of the five foes was a man, brutish and slope-shouldered, clad in a leather apron and leggings, clutching a massive cleaver attached to a three-foot-long pole. Their heads were covered in shapeless cloth masks, giving them something of the air of executioners, and they stood ready, weapons gripped in both hands.
“Damn,” hissed Scorio, pushing himself slowly, methodically, to his feet. He swayed, blood pouring down his back and the side of his face, soaking into his shredded robes, trickling down his calves. “Gentlemen.”
The five brutes shifted their weights as they rotated before him, and then as one, their forms were encased in an iridescent sheen, a thin film that caused them to glisten in Scorio’s darkvision.
“What is that?” He staggered, falling back against the iron wall. “You guys invulnerable like Lianshi?”
None of the brutes responded. They just spun on and on, revolving past each other, cleavers gripped in their ham hock hands, waiting with terrible patience.
“Damn it all.” Scorio forced himself off the wall. “At least you’re waiting for me. Mighty polite.”
With great deliberation, he set to sweeping Iron mana into his Heart, then paused. He’d not had the time before to consider it, but there was a new form of mana in the air. Brassy and bright, it fluttered and surged as if alive, twining about the staid Iron, more centered and denser than the ephemeral Copper, bright against the background Coal.
Bronze mana.
The power of a Tomb Spark.
Scorio blinked slowly, forced his eyes to focus. The revolving foes weren’t helping the sense of dizziness brought on by the pain and blood loss.
Bronze mana.
“Let’s try it,” he said, and reached forth his blood-smeared hand as if he could grasp the power directly.
At the same time, he swept the Bronze into his Heart. It was more pliable than the Iron, yet not nearly so flighty as the Copper. It required more work, however; Scorio was forced to lower his chin, clench his jaw, and truly focus to scoop the mana into his Heart.
But as it flowed into him, he felt its power radiate through his body, enhance his healing, felt the pain dull, its plangent ferocity blunted. More and more he swept the Bronze in, until he felt drunk on power. Delirious, his thoughts fluid, his body splitting into a duality, part pain and ruined tapestry of flesh, part exalted instrument of glory and destruction.
“There,” he whispered, blood pooling about his feet, his head hanging low so that he stared at his foes from under his brows. “Now I’m ready.”
And with a flexion of his will, he lit his Heart, and caused it to burn Bronze.
Ephemeral flames of gold rushed up in a sublime display of might. Strength coursed through him, washing the pain away like a flash flood might quench a flame. He breathed deeply, chest fully expanding, felt the ruined muscles and lacerated skin part as he did so, but barely registered the agony. Focused instead on how his Tomb Spark body was already beginning to heal, to staunch the flow of blood, to knit his shredded flesh together.