Slot canyons, toxic ponds, scrabble paths littered with loose shale and scoria. The worst terrain to fight in, but when Scorio caught sight of their first fiend he realized it wouldn’t matter.
A Symmetron.
They’d been described to him back at the war camp. Half the size of a whale ship, it picked its way forward with delicacy, each of its four legs segmented like a spider’s and holding up its massive central trunk. Four arms wove about it, each three-fingered hand clutching a club larger than Scorio was tall, and atop its four shoulders sat a four-faced golden mask, hollow in the center and with each face portraying a grotesque visage, hollow-eyed, cheeks bulging, nose hooked.
There was no surprising Symmetrons. It constantly stared out in all four directions, as aware of its rear as it was the path it pursued, its stone-gray body capable of reversing direction with ease, its arms acting independently, and Scorio had been warned that though they might look ponderous and slow, they could explode into brutal action without warning.
It was so large that it simply stepped over ravines, navigated the broken hills and rough slopes with cautious grace, obviating the perils of much of the terrain. Easily five times Scorio’s own height, its blank masks stared out in all directions across the Telurian Band without expression or indication that it had seen their approach.
Scorio dropped to the bottom of the slot canyon and looked back to the others. “We approach it from below, use the terrain to hide us -”
A roar shook the air, and Scorio immediately leaped halfway back up the canyon side, scrambled the rest of the way, and saw Charoth in his fell-tiger form completing his leap, arms flung out wide, talons trailing fire, his whole body incandescent with power.
Behind him the Symmetron reeled, its quadruple masked head torn asunder, its clubs waving like the legs of a dying beetle, its balance disrupted. A moment later it toppled over, collapsing down the slope of the broad hill on which it had walked, clubs falling, torso keeling over, to roll and slide down, dead.
“Damn,” whispered Scorio, watching as Charoth dropped out of view. Raising his eyes, he saw a dozen more Gold-tempered fiends turning in the distance to regard them. Symmetrons stood preeminent, all of them four-sided, all of them immediately reversing direction to begin marching their way.
But there were flickers of movement, fast as Angraths, faster, no doubt, as other kinds of Gold-tempered fiends coursed back to investigate. Scorio caught glimpses of white tentacles floating around some of them like diffused clouds and realized: Ixithilions. The same lethal fiends that had nearly killed them while they’d traveled to the Fiery Shoals with Manticore. Even Davelos and Evelyn, experienced Dread Blazes both, had been afraid of them.
But a single monstrous fiend leaped briefly into view, surging from one ravine to drop into the next, and Scorio felt his gut tighten. It was built much like an Okoz, huge and racing on all fours, its forelegs actually huge arms, its head small atop a barrel chest, but where the Okozs had clearly been bestial and in some manner animals as Scorio understood them, this fiend was a mass of writhing black tentacles that twisted about each other to form a body, its pauldrons and huge tusked head worn like platinum masks, its tentacle-formed arms flowing into huge platinum gauntlets, its chest plate and boots of similar material. It was as if a hundred huge eels had taken up these pieces of armor and used them to give itself form, the coils bunching and flexing like muscles, the composite fiend’s power and speed terrifying to behold.
Then it dropped out of sight and was gone.
A Nethercoil.
Almost Scorio took one of Plassus’ treasures there and then, but then he mastered himself and leaped back down to join the others. “Symmetrons, Ixithilions, and Nethercoils incoming. We need to find a better place to fight.”
Naomi arose into her Nightmare Lady form, tail lashing, and Himiko became the Shadow Petal, both hideous yet such welcome presences that Scorio almost laughed in relief. Merideva summoned her burning staff, and Nyrix raised his white fire crossbow to his shoulder.
“Merideva? Positioning,” he asked.
The statuesque brunette cast around, eyes narrowed, and pointed at a broken hill that loomed over to their left. “We retreat to that pocket lake we passed before. Place Fyrona just below that peak, it will give her a view over the pocket but keep her hidden.”
Nyrix nodded, loosed a burning bolt at the distant hill, then shot a bolt at his feet. A portal opened up, and he led Fyrona through and was gone.
The rest of them fell back, racing over the sharp rocks, along the slot canyon till it opened into the pocket lake they’d recently passed. The water was shallow, its metallic surface broken constantly by stone ridges and outcroppings, and cliffs surrounded it in an oval shape, rising some six or so yards toward the burning skies.
The Nightmare Lady crouched and stretched forth her hand, causing the far end to cloud with black mist, while the Shadow Petal vanished only to reappear atop a ledge just below the clifftops. Scorio fought to deepen and slow his breathing, not igniting yet, fingers rippling, and placed himself in the center of the lake, walking through the ankle-deep water to a rough island in the center where he set down his pack.
Merideva hung back; her ability to dash forward made it so that she was effectively already at his side, but by placing herself at the rear of the lake she allowed the fiends to think her less of an immediate threat.
Another distant roar sounded, then a dull, echoing boom that caused the surface of the lake to ripple.
The main battle had been joined.
Seized by an impulse, Scorio closed his eyes and reached out with his senses. The air above swirled with massively dense Bronze; Plassus had used his dominion to concentrate the mana here for their benefit. But he sought to reach past those rich banks of power toward the battle.
Something was coming, and fast.
There.
Scorio’s eyes snapped open as the Nethercoil sprang into view. For the briefest of seconds it simply hung in the air, time seeming to slow as Scorio’s eyes widened at its size and speed. Its platinum helm depicted a grinning face, flanked on both sides by huge tusks that curled upward, each as big as Scorio’s arm and wickedly pointed. Layered pauldrons bulked out its shoulders, and a thick mass of tentacles burst out the back of its head like a mane of hair. Its coils were the darkest of purples, striated in the faintest gray, and it pulsed with a terrible energy, its presence immediately malevolent and overwhelming.
Fyrona unleashed her eye blast, catching it in the flank at the extremity of her range; the black energy played over its shoulder and hip, not seeming to hurt the fiend, which landed fluidly in the Nightmare Lady’s dark fog. The many tails entered a frenzy, whipping at the huge fiend as it rushed through them, their blades bouncing off its platinum armor as much as they sank into its muscular tentacles.
Then it was out and upon Scorio, faster than he could believe, a huge fist drawing back to dash him across the rocks.
Scorio’s Heart ignited almost of its own accord and he shifted into flame form just as the fist passed through him, causing his burning body to explode into writhing ropes that quickly coalesced, his vision momentarily fragmenting into dozens of spinning fragments. He drew back and up into the air, flaming wings beating powerfully, and was checked from unleashing his blast by Merideva springing into battle, crossing the space in a burning dash to slam her burning staff into the Nethercoil’s arm.
The Shadow Petal appeared above and behind the fiend, swinging both blades as she dropped, and when Scorio swooped to the side to give himself the best angle, he inhaled the fire and immediately unleashed it.