A Symmetron was staggering away from the fight, one of its four legs severed at the knee, causing its central torso to lurch and flag as it hobbled over the broken land.
“There!” Scorio pointed. “Let’s take that one down.”
The Nightmare Lady and Shadow Petal split up, each heading out wide to flank. Fyrona and Alain nodded and broke into a run, navigating the geography as best they could. Scorio dropped low, not wanting to present a tempting target, and flew slowly toward the fiend.
A flash of gold filled the sky, and the ground rumbled again. Scorio flinched, glanced back, but whatever had just taken place was already over, the battle continuing.
The Symmetron saw him coming. It changed direction flawlessly to approach him, clubs waving back and forth as if in anticipation. Scorio inhaled deeply, pulled his graxil larvae from his robe, popped it in his mouth, and dropped his pack into a narrow crevasse as he surged into his scaled form by dipping low and not stopping.
The papery ball crunched, his mouth flooded with dusty bitterness, and then a knuckle-shaped object with a wiry tail wormed its way down his gullet with a nauseating flutter.
Everything changed when it gave its first pulse.
Emerald mana emanated with such force that Scorio felt thunderstruck. It resonated within him like a gong beaten by a giant hammer, and his great Heart drank it all.
Scorio tried and immediately failed to guide the mana into his ignition; the graxil moved into a spiritual mana-realm and placed itself within his Heart, and there it began to pulse, slowly and surely, letting off wave after wave of Emerald power.
As a Dread Blaze he could take in Gold without difficulty. Emerald? It was almost too much. It felt like getting drunk on lava. His veins blazed as crude, raw power flooded his being, his heart raced, his body immediately became drenched in sweat. Not since the Crucible had he fought to control such power.
Up he flew into his scaled form, and when the Symmetron’s golden mask blazed gold and unleashed a beam of raw power at him, Scorio laughed, laughed wildly and banked hard to the right, cutting away from the beam which chased him, down and around, faster than he could evade.
So Scorio completely retracted his wings and simply fell amongst the rocky spires and peaks, down into a twisty ravine to hit the sandy floor and crouch low as he took the drop and then burst forward, faster than he’d ever run before, trying to outrun the madness that the Emerald mana sought to bequeath upon his soul.
Faster and faster till he couldn’t take the limitation of his own legs any longer and he hurled himself back into the sky, rising six, seven yards into the air and snapping out his wings to fly right at the towering fiend, huge like a fortress, fighting off the Nightmare Lady with swings of its club as it loosed another blast of gold at the Shadow Petal.
Scorio screamed, his innards aflame, and slammed into the Symmetron at full tilt, slashing with his claws as he collided with the great gray trunk. Such was his strength that he tore huge gouts of gray ossified flesh from its side, causing the fiend to reel back in dismay and smack at itself with a club.
Scorio twisted and slammed his fist into the oncoming weapon. He felt something snap in his arm but the club exploded into fragments, and not feeling the pain he turned and tore his good talons through the torso once more, revealing thick pulsing veins deep within its corpus that he ripped apart.
One of the Symmetron’s arms went limp as it dropped its club. Its mask lit up again, and it unleashed a beam of gold light point blank at the Nightmare Lady as she leaped through the air to strike at its head.
Scorio let out bark of refusal, a sound of sheer negation, and summoned his Shroud right before the fiend’s face. The blast of gold splashed in every direction as it failed to pierce the shield, and then the Nightmare Lady fell upon its head, tail slashing, claws wrestling with the metal contours of its four-sided mask.
Scorio entered his flame form and in a fit of madness poured himself into the large, tubular veins. He lost his sight, everything became pulsing gold and darkness, and with the roaring of his own incandescence in his ears he flooded up through the tubes, burning everything as he went, only to explode out the top of its shoulders, emerging from huge vents hidden in the center of its torso by the four-faced mask.
The Symmetron groaned, its whole body shuddering, and then one leg went dead and it collapsed onto its side. The Nightmare Lady tore its head off as Scorio flew up into the air, and when he turned to blast the fiend with black fire she leaped off so that he could immolate it at will.
Fyrona was attacking it from the ground, the Shadow Petal strode in to stab it through the base, and then it spasmed and went still.
But the graxil larvae continued to pulse brutish power into Scorio. He felt like his body was burning up, his Heart straining to contain the Emerald might. Had it been his old Heart, it would have fragmented.
Even so, he had to release the power.
He had to burn it off.
He had to fight and kill before it did irreparable damage to his Heart.
Scorio shoved away from the fallen Symmetron and began winging his way toward the heart of the battle.
“Where are you going?” screamed the Nightmare Lady.
Scorio ignored her and fought for more speed. Plassus had said it would kick off the top of their heads, but he’d had no idea. Perhaps he’d been a Charnel Duke for too long. Perhaps he simply didn’t care.
But Scorio felt like he was going to burst apart at the seams.
A Nethercoil was curving around the outside of the main battle, angling to come in behind a trio of Pyre Lords. Scorio dove down, a scream tearing itself from his throat as he dropped like a meteor upon the Gold-tempered fiend.
Which looked up, skittered to the side, then bunched its black coils beneath it to leap up and meet him, eager for an easy kill.
Scorio slammed his Shroud into its face, then when that shattered he hit it with a command fueled by all his fury: DIE!
The Nethercoil shuddered and recoiled midair, the sheer violence of the command unnerving it, but it was too late: Scorio shifted into his flame form and swam through the fiend, charring its tentacles and blackening its platinum armor. He immediately twisted upon emerging on its far side, coalesced into his physical form and blew a roaring plume of black flame all over its twisting form, incinerating it with his might.
And for the first time he saw that his black flames were tinged with flickers of the purest Emerald.
The Nethercoil spasmed, unlaced itself as it fell, but Scorio flipped back around, not willing to wait and ensure it was dead, and in a low glide sped just a yard over the sharp rocks, fighting for speed, ever more speed, tears whipped by the wind from his narrowed eyes.
An Ixithilion was blasted back by some terrible blow, tumbling head over heels, but arrested its fall with its tentacles, lifted its body clear from the rocks and righted itself nimbly, only to catch sight of Scorio a second before he impacted it.
It tried to leap aside but Scorio slammed into it, shoulder first, and lifted it clear off the ground. He summoned his Shroud right above his back like a turtle’s shell, and then dipped low enough to the ground that he could thrust the fiend down and tear it along the rocks as he flew.
The Ixithilion burst into a frenetic frenzy of stabbing, but Scorio’s Shroud held firm, and it couldn’t get its tentacles beneath it due to the rock. Shards and fragments of stone flew up as the fiend dug a furrow through the living rock, its body shredding as Scorio shoved it down but powered forward, his talons biting into the fiend’s body, and then with a scream he hurled it away, sent it tumbling over the rocks to rise up, burning still, burning with each terrible pulse of Emerald power, to see Charoth squaring off against a Nethercoil so massive it rose nearly twice the height of its brethren, its armor metallic red, its eyes burning so bright they were like lanterns.