STOP! Scorio commanded, but he felt the order fail to take hold; the Gold-tempered fiend was simply too strong. Instead, he hurled up his Shroud, placing it right in the fiend’s face, so that it reared back, stabbing at the curved surface. Scorio leaped, eschewing his wings so that he instead fell upon the Ixithilion and turned to flame at the last moment.
The fiend darted to the left, abandoning its assault on the Shroud, and Scorio flew after it, turning himself into a burning spear. The fiend retreated, nimble as a spider, and in fear of losing it Scorio inhaled the flames, sucked them shallowly into his chest and immediately blew them out after the fleeing foe.
Which leaped high, legs folding against its underside, over the plume to fall upon Scorio.
Which might have worked if Scorio hadn’t simply raised his face and the plume of fire with it.
The fiend shrieked as it was caught in the blast, its body blackening and splitting, then it slammed into Scorio’s Shroud and shattered it, all five steel points hitting the shield at once.
Scorio panicked, not having expected it to break through so quickly, and tried to hurl himself aside; he felt a steel point slam into his ribs where the scales were thinner and sink deep, but his dive tore him free from the assault and he hit the sharp rocks to lie outstretched and stunned.
But there was no time for pain. Scorio twisted, to the Ixithilion rising to attack him, its ivory body cindered and warped by the flames, and then the Shadow Petal appeared behind it, her blade passing through it like a shadow.
The Ixithilion shivered and fell over, dead.
“Damn,” hissed Scorio, pressing his hand to his side where blood was pouring forth freely. The wound was deep, and all sorts of things felt wrong with his innards. “Thanks.”
The Shadow Petal flickered and disappeared.
Scorio forced himself to rise. Alain was crouched beside Fyrona, the shattered Vitality Pearl vial in his fist as he lifted her head to pour goo past her lips. Scorio staggered over to Nyrix, but the Dread Blaze was dead, his left eye a red rose of blood and stirred brains.
Fighting down his gorge, Scorio dropped beside the slender youth and patted his robe, found his pills and vial, and glanced around the lake. The Nightmare Lady was helping Merideva with the remaining fiend.
Scorio shuddered and felt a wave of cold pass over him. The blood wouldn’t stop flowing from his side, and his gut felt churned and fluid. So he bit into Nyrix’s Vitality Pearl vial, and immediately felt the treasure work its magic. The shuddery sensation of wrongness faded away quickly, his scales healed over, and his strength flowed back into him.
But it left a feeling of feverish intensity in its place. His Heart felt like it was resonating to a deep chord he couldn’t hear, and he knew that consuming another Vitality Pearl would harm him as much as it helped.
Merideva screamed.
Scorio startled, rose, and saw her lift up off the ground, a tentacle spiked into her shoulder, and then her scream was cut off as a second slammed into her open mouth. It burst out the back of her head, and then the Nightmare Lady and the Shadow Petal cut it apart.
Scorio raced over, but it was too late. Merideva lay like a ragdoll, blood puddling out the back of her head to mix with the brackish waters.
The Nightmare Lady kneeled by her side, became Naomi, and drew her Vitality Pearl vial from her own robes, but the Shadow Petal placed the flat of her white blade across Naomi’s hand.
“Don’t,” said the skull-headed Great Soul. “She’s gone.”
Naomi grimaced and sank back to sit on her heels.
“Nyrix is dead, too.” Scorio ran his fingers through sweat-soaked hair. Looking back, he saw Fyrona sitting up, Alain’s arm around her shoulders as she choked down emotion.
“We’re not done yet,” said the Shadow Petal, turning to stare toward the battle. The roars, trumpeting shrieks, and basso profundo rumbles had only grown in intensity.
Scorio felt terribly alive, filled with a tremulous vitality and burning with unnatural energy. An overdose of the Vitality Pearl, perhaps. He jogged across the shallow water to take up his much-abused pack, and when he returned he tapped his fingers over his robe where the graxil larvae and the Peaceful Wheel pill lay. “Let’s go play our part, then.”
Naomi looked like she wanted to argue, but then she rose and stood beside him in her Nightmare Lady form. “You damned fool.”
“Fyrona?” Scorio’s call echoed off the cliffs. “Ready?”
She stared at him in panic, eyes wide, but gave a jerky nod regardless.
Scorio took a deep breath. They’d pushed so hard, for so long now, that he knew that what luck they’d possessed had run out long ago.
If they went up there, if they joined in the battle, they were almost certainly going to die.
“But who wants to live forever?” he whispered, and leaped up into the sky.
Chapter 44
Scorio burst out into the open and stared over the blasted landscape. Everywhere he looked he saw fiends doing battle with Great Souls, but such battles as he’d never seen. The mana was tormented, streaming down from the heavens to split and twist and spire into countless vortices that flew frenetically back and forth, drinking in all the ambient power with which to feed their creators.
Who needed every ounce they could take. These Gold-tempered fiends were starved of power but numbered in the hundreds, and now the bulk of their roaming pack had turned to square off against Plassus and his forces. To seek to pin down the foes who were intent on tearing them apart as fast and as furiously as they could.
Jova flew high, riding a plinth of rock and bringing the landscape beneath her to life. Where she passed, the rocks tore themselves from the ground and thrust themselves into the underbellies of fiends, even as she was trailed by a cloud of shards that she renewed each time she hurled them in a deadly shower at her next target.
Aezryna was gone, disappeared like Wesanin into a towering tornado of ice that bent and sped across a frozen landscape, rocks and gulleys and gulches frozen with rime and ice, while blasts of hail rained down upon her foes and shredded them where they stood.
Charoth was a fiend in his own right. Unstoppable, his fury unflagging, he walked nowhere, ran nowhere, but flung himself endlessly at each new target, talons blazing with crimson fire, his muscled body seeming indestructible as he tore through fiend after fiend.
And around these fought other Blood Barons, other Pyre Lords, less interested in working together as Taron had instructed his company, but each carving out their own fiefdom in which to wreak ruin.
But the fiends were far from helpless. As quickly as they fell to Blood Barons more came in, rapid, relentless, fearless. Symmetrons endlessly scuttled forward, spinning and twisting and swinging their clubs, Nethercoils bounded in with muscular speed, reforming just as many times as they splattered apart. Ixithilions were everywhere, the smallest of the fiends present and endlessly nimble, their tentacles spearing out as they leaped and shied and dodged and ducked.
For a moment Scorio simply stared, rendered mute by the spectacle of violence. Veils of ice and shards of stone rained down from the skies, blasts of white lightning and shuddering cylinders of brutally enhanced gravity shook the battlefield, while others darted to and fro, unleashing complex powers that Scorio couldn’t grasp.
A Symmetron’s four-sided head blazed with virulent gold light and then it unleashed a blast at Jova as she flew by; her plinth shattered, she disappeared within the beam of light, then fell, a wizened, blackened corpse, to disappear into a canyon.
Scorio shuddered, taken aback, but consoled himself: there was practically no killing her.
But it was a good warning: wading into the heart of this battle would be their deaths. No; their role was to pick off the wounded and isolated.