A full recharge still took me a few minutes. Teft’s ability to recharge the sigils in a few moments was pretty impressive. Most people, even experts, didn’t have that kind of mana control. I was getting faster at it, but I had a long way before I reached Teft’s level of proficiency.
I was still in the process of recharging when Patrick appeared in front of me.
On the floor.
More alarmingly, he wasn’t moving.
I rushed to his side, kneeling and gingerly rolling him over. Unconscious. It took me a moment to confirm that his chest was still rising and falling.
I heard a laugh from the other couch. “Looks like you lost one.”
I whipped my head up to glare at her. “What’s wrong with him?” I demanded.
She rolled her eyes. “Relax, kid. He’s just asleep. He’ll wake up when the test is over.”
I let out a low growl, which actually drew an expression of concern from her. Reaching down with both arms, I lifted Patrick from the cold stone of the floor and set him down on the couch I’d vacated.
I didn’t realize that the numbness in my arm was gone until after I’d finished moving him. Anger had burned away the chill in my mind.
I stomped my way toward the exit door.
“Where are you going?” The other student asked.
“To finish this.”
I pushed into the main room, then back to the door where I’d first entered the challenge. I didn’t know what the rules were for re-entering when someone was knocked out, but she had said that I was still technically taking the test.
I opened the door and saw the swirl of darkness within. This time, I was ready.
The sound of muffled gunfire reached me before sight took hold.
The room was moderately lit this time, three torches burning different colors on the walls. Jin was backpedaling rapidly, twin revolvers in his hands.
The creature, now fully visible, lashed out at him with vicious speed, four tendrils striking downward with whip-like motions, piercing the floor as Jin jumped and fired his guns. Both shots hit home, joining other bullet holes in the creature’s scaly hide. The wounds dripped green ichor that sizzled as it splattered against the room’s floor.
Jin had the creature’s attention, but his attacks seemed to be having a minimal effect. It retracted the tendrils and lunged, jaws outstretched. Jin stepped to the side, brushing a corner of his coat into the creature’s mouth. It snapped down on the cloth, fangs piercing into the uniform as Jin twisted and pressed a revolver against the top of its head, firing straight into the skull.
The beast recoiled at the impact, tearing a ragged section out of Jin’s coat and shaking its head as if to rid itself of an insect. Then it surged again, too close now for Jin to dodge.
So he didn’t. He kicked it in the face once, twice, and thrice before bringing his gun down to smash it in the face.
By this point, I had my sword drawn, and I was slowly advancing. I really didn’t want to get into melee range of that thing, but the sword was undoubtedly the most effective weapon in my possession. If bullets were barely slowing the thing down, I had little chance of killing it with the gauntlet or the cane sitting on my opposite hip.
A tendril snapped forward, forcing Jin to duck to avoid being impaled, and the creature took that opportunity to ram him with its horns. Jin tried to shift to the right, but one of the horns caught him as the beast charged. I saw his barrier flicker into existence, then begin to splinter and crack as the creature pushed, slamming Jin into the wall.
Jin gasped as the move knocked the air out of his lungs, then began pounding on the creature’s head ineffectively with his weapons. I didn’t know why he wasn’t firing the guns, but I couldn’t let this go on. The cracks spreading like spiderwebs across his barrier were a sign that it was at critical capacity. In a moment, he’d go from merely being crushed to having a three foot horn sticking through his chest.
Unacceptable.
I felt the wisps of frost gathering on my blade as I thrust it into the creature’s side, aiming for where I hoped a heart might be. I wasn’t exactly familiar with the anatomy of unidentifiable nightmare monsters, from the way it roared as the saber pierced through a soft-spot between scales I guessed I’d hit something important.
It tried to turn toward me, and I pushed the weapon deeper, letting out a roar of my own as I shoved. A visible layer of frost expanded outward from the wound, spreading across the creature’s flank.
It spun, swept my legs out from under me with a claw, and then jumped backward as I hit the floor.
And as I recovered, readying a gauntlet to block the next strike, it turned — and it ran.
Taking my sword with it as it passed through the wall.
My eyes widened. I… hadn’t realized that was possible.
Jin had recovered before I did, reaching down with a hand and helping me to my feet. “Good timing,” he observed. His breaths had slowed to an almost normal rate. “Patrick is dead. We solved the torch problem, but the creature came anyway.”
“What’s the solution?” I glanced at the torches. Only two of them remained lit, indicating one of them had gone out during the fight.
“They’re in matched pairs. Doesn’t matter which mana type you start with, but you need to light the match with the same type.”
And we’d tried to light two non-matching ones with fire, and failed the puzzle. That made sense. “Okay, so we’ve still got two lit with… what is that, lightning?” The two lit torches had some kind of crackling energy floating within them.
Jin nodded. “I do not know if we have enough distinct mana types for the two remaining pairs without Patrick. We had managed to ignite two pairs, but the creature ambushed him when he walked into the darkness to light the last.”
Ugh. “Did you try gray?”
He again nodded. “Doesn’t work.”
I frowned, thinking back to the poem.
Two to keep our bodies strong,
A pair to keep our hearts from wrong,
A final two to light the path.
Maybe the pairs had to be physical, mental, and, uh, light? I wasn’t really sure on that last one.
It was worth trying. I cautiously moved over to the nearest unlit torch and pressed my gauntlet against it. “Have you tried transference?”
“No.”
I activate the gauntlet, blasting the torch with raw kinetic force. The torch shook, cracks appearing on the surface of the glass — oops — and a flicker of light manifested within the orb.
Success!
“Looks like that one works. Do you know which one—,”
Jin was pointing to the other side of the room when I turned to look at him. There was a torch back there, sure, but that wasn’t what he was pointing at.
Eyes in the dark. My sword was still lodged in the creature’s side, the weapon’s icy glow illuminating a patch of frost that was still slowly spreading across the monster’s hide.
I cracked my neck. It was time to get my sword back.
I glanced at Jin. “You need a minute to reload?”
“I already did. That monster can make itself selectively incorporeal, though. If it sees me aiming, it’ll just go incorporeal to avoid most of the hits.”
Why wasn’t it going incorporeal to get rid of the sword, then? Oh, maybe the weapon being stuck in it meant the creature’s ability treated the saber as part of its own body? That explained how it managed to take the weapon out through the wall earlier.
“I’ll distract it.”
“Patrick said that, too.”
…That’s grim.