by Demi Harper
He glanced up at the summit, torn. He’d made a promise to Corey. The gnomes needed his help. Lila had as much as confessed that she was working to hurt them all; her death here seemed an appropriate sacrifice, giving them the time they needed to race back to the crater city and stand with the gnomes against whatever threat she’d sent against them this time.
And yet.
They’d already abandoned her once. He, Coll and Tiri had left her to a fate too horrifying to contemplate. In a way, that meant they were directly responsible for all that had happened to her since.
Lila clearly wasn’t herself. Not only had she been manipulated by Varnell—Tiri had mentioned as much, though the hastily scrawled note she’d written Benin hadn’t exactly gone into detail—she’d also been taken by this Lord of Light, who was obviously some kind of demon.
Whatever had possessed her earlier had left her now; her face was no longer pale and black-veined, but purple-blue and terrified. Something had made her this way. And it was up to Benin to help her. He owed her that much at least.
But the gnomes…
A tiny hand patted his calf firmly. He looked down to see Ajax readying his spear. The gnomish warrior’s eyes were fixed upon the Zolom.
Benin banished the last of his doubts and began to cast.
Sixty-Four
Let There Be Light
Corey
It took my gem.
As the eight-legged enemy bounded off with my Core clutched triumphantly in its palps, the terror I’d felt at not being able to finish the exodus in time grew to paralyzing new levels. That fear was quickly replaced with outrage at the trogloraptor’s sheer gods-damned audacity.
It took my gem!
After the past month and more, after everything we’d been through, this spider’s impertinent master thought they could stop us from completing what we’d set out to do?
Not on my watch.
Our strategy had changed. After a moment’s Divine Inspiration, Gneil and the acolytes were sprinting toward the wagon that held one of our most useful assets. Rather than chase the creature away, we needed to stop it from escaping, recover my gem, then find a way to get rid of it—all before the timer ran down.
Time remaining for Exodus: 8 minutes, 55 seconds
Sheer panic and determination gave strength to my avatar’s muscles, as did the fury juice she’d taken from the cooks earlier. She flew across the ground in pursuit of the enemy, faster and stronger and more fearless than ever, and drove her spear into the back of the trogloraptor’s chitinous knee. Her second spear plunged into another leg an instant later. Then she was yanking them out, twisting and dodging to avoid being trampled as she leapt for yet another limb and began to climb, using her half-spears like a mountain climber’s pitons.
Any earlier compunction I’d felt at harming the creature was gone, replaced with the desperate desire to see the exodus through to its end come what may. The trogloraptor might be a mere puppet in the grand scheme of things, but right now it was standing between me and the future safety of my tribe.
Though Riskin’s weight was minimal, the trogloraptor’s legs were proportionally slender enough that her climb was hampering its movement even if it wasn’t hurting it. Its tough hairs and exoskeleton had prevented her weapons from doing much damage despite the fury-inspired force with which she’d driven them, so now she was climbing to seek a more vulnerable spot where the leg joined the body.
Repair complete!
Machine acquired: Mobile Trebuchet.
New vocations unlocked!
Issuing instructions via the Augmentary while free-climbing a spider wasn’t easy. The unfamiliar new “Machines” interface refused to accommodate my attempts to order the builders to load the trebuchet’s arm. However, I quickly realized why.
I selected the nearest warrior—a slinger whom I’d dubbed “Cannonball” for his tendency to use overlarge rocks as ammunition rather than standard-sized bullets—and allocated him the Trebuchet Operative vocation. Then I switched to Dovetail the carpenter, reassigning her as an Engineer. Both vocations had been unlocked with the completion of a functioning siege engine, probably because the trebuchet required at least one of each to operate it.
This time, the Augmentary allowed me to select the acolytes’ burden as the trebuchet’s ammunition. As soon as I did, Dovetail and Cannonball hurried forward to take it from them. As they loaded the cradle and fiddled with the calibrating mechanism, the botanists backed away from the machine, relief clear on their faces. They still clutched the sacks of finger flingers I’d originally intended to launch; now that our goal was to stop the trogloraptor rather than scare it off, the botanists’ precious hybrid shrooms would remain unsmashed.
But the trogloraptor’s renewed purpose had brought it around to the wrong side of the caldera. The trebuchet would not be ready in time to launch before the arachnid was out of range.
Then something glinted down below, and I silently rejoiced. The trogloraptor was so focused on escaping it didn’t notice Longshank step out from the shelter of a ruined building until the hunter buried his spear in the creature’s leg.
Unlike the obsidian speartips of Ris’kin’s weapons, Longshank’s crystal spear pierced spiny hairs and exoskeleton alike, plunging into the trogloraptor’s leg like a crossbow bolt through a watermelon. It shrieked and stumbled, but the will that drove it forced it onward, more slowly but still just as steady. Longshank was dragged along behind it. He refused to relinquish his shiny new spear, and was attempting to work it free even as his mismatched armor of mole-rat hide and snakeskin scraped across the rubbled ground.
Why won’t you stop? I cursed the trogloraptor. Stop, damn it!
Ris’kin drove her spear into the creature again and again, hoping the assault would at least make it lose its hold on my Core, but to no avail. Another few seconds and it would be out of the trebuchet’s range.
This is the part where Binky usually jumps in to save the day, I thought, desperately hoping the spider would miraculously make an appearance. But no. Even if Binky was still alive, it seemed he was no longer with us.
Another tent crumpled beneath the trogloraptor’s clawed feet. Beyond it, close to the trailhead where the gnomes would have made their entrance and caught their first sight of their ancestral city, the humans had pitched their tent. Past that was the trail. If the arachnid reached it, the trebuchet would be useless, and all would be lost.
The ‘raptor plowed on toward it like it was the light at the end of the tunnel. Then suddenly there was light.
Blinding illumination shone from Benin and Coll’s tent. Squinting against the sudden unexpected radiance, Ris’kin’s sharp vision picked out the silhouettes of two small figures, holding the chemsphere between them. It seemed Swift and Cheer had decided to follow us up here after all, and had immediately set about their favorite pastime of pillaging Benin’s belongings.
Unlike the illumishrooms, which the trogloraptor had barely seemed to even notice, the light from the humans’ chemsphere made it hiss and screech and veer away as though it had been hit with physical force. It recovered after a few moments, but to my relief the trebuchet crew had finally accomplished their loading and aiming and had reached the final command I’d left in the queue.
Even at this distance I heard the powerful kick of the mechanism. Still blinking away spots of light, Ris’kin and I searched the sky until we saw the projectile arcing across toward the ‘raptor.
Toward us, I realized.
We slid down to the ground, catching a few slices from razor-sharp leg hairs on the way down, then tugged Longshank away. The skynet opened up like a silky, sticky flower as it sailed downward toward the trogloraptor.
And missed.
Sixty-Five
No Time
Benin
The Marsh Zolom’s tongue flicked out from between its fangs, as though impatient to be done throttling this human so it could sooner wreak its revenge on the other two. But when Ajax sprin
ted forward, its head jerked in the gnome’s direction. It opened its jaws and lunged.
As dexterous as a Guild ranger, Ajax dodged and spun. The spear whirled in his hands. The Zolom’s jaws closed on empty air—
—and then stopped, held open by the spear that was now impaling the serrated roof of its mouth. The spear’s butt was wedged firmly behind the Zolom’s bottom fang, and Ajax scurried away to safety.
The Zolom hissed furiously. The spear was already starting to crack, but it didn’t need to last much longer. Benin only needed a moment, and the gnomish warrior had given him plenty. He took aim and released.
The ball of lightning shot into the snake’s open mouth a moment before the spear shaft finally splintered. Fanged jaws snapped shut around the crackling sphere and the snake swallowed on instinct. He’d tried this before, but not with Pyra’s power behind it. Hopefully the empowered spell would be enough.
Benin crossed his fingers, trying not to look at Lila’s face. Her eyes were beginning to bulge, and he was pretty sure she didn’t have much longer.
He almost cheered when the snake’s body started to convulse. It twitched and jerked as the lightning sphere forced its way through its innards. The coils around Lila loosened, the snake losing control of its own muscles, and she collapsed on top of them, gasping and convulsing almost as violently as the serpent.
He maintained a wary distance, as did Coll. As she regained her breath, the snake still twitching and jerking behind her, she stared at Benin. “Why?” she croaked.
He shrugged lamely. Then he shouted, “Look out!”
This time she didn’t scoff, but threw herself flat on the ground. The Zolom lunged past her, jaws snapping uncontrollably, coils twitching. It seemed to no longer have control of its tongue, so was striking blindly and unpredictably at everything around it.
No matter what we throw at it, it shrugs it off, he thought despairingly. Can anything we do kill it? Can it even be killed at all?
There was a yelp as its head smashed blindly into Pyra, knocking her down and momentarily stunning her. The Zolom hissed triumphantly as it located one of its prey, and reared back for another strike. Past-Benin would have screamed and thrown fire, raging pointlessly at it for daring to harm his familiar. But the new Benin knew that would do no good. Any magic he threw at it would just bounce off its hide; he wouldn’t get a lucky strike again like with the lightning ball, no matter how focused his magic was these days.
As the Zolom lunged again, Benin did the only thing that had a chance of saving her. He threw himself in front of the dazed emberfox.
Sheltering his familiar with his own body, he tensed, waiting for the fangs to puncture his skin at any moment, soon to be followed no doubt with deadly constriction. When no attack landed, he dared a glance over his shoulder.
The Zolom’s fanged face was bare inches away from his, muzzled by vines. Coll was looking between Lila and Benin, hefting his hammer. “We have to finish it.” His tone implied, “But how?”
Vines creaked as the serpent strained against them. Lila grunted, conjuring more; they burst from the ground to wrap around the Zolom’s coils, also stopping its tail, which had been creeping once more in her direction.
“You know what you need to do.”
It was Bekkit who spoke up. Benin had forgotten he was even here.
“Are you mad?” Fear shot through him as he registered what the sprite had meant.
“It’s the only option if we’re to stand a chance of surviving against that beast.” The sprite’s voice was weakening by the minute, his glow so dim as to almost be invisible as he alighted on Benin’s shoulder.
“You saw what happened last time. I don’t have the control to maintain them!”
“No. Not yet.” Bekkit took a deep breath, as though about to ask him a huge favor. “But I do.”
“Ready?”
Lila nodded tersely. She was beginning to tremble with the effort of maintaining so many vines, but he trusted her to hold a little longer.
Ajax stood guard further up the trail, watching over Pyra, who still seemed dazed. Coll stood nearby, hammer at the ready as ever, though if he ended up having to use it for anything other than this one task, that meant they’d have failed.
We won’t fail.
Benin tried to believe that as he reached out a hand and began persuading the elements to mingle. He drew carefully on Pyra’s source to power and maintain it.
The second presence in his mind made sure of it.
With Pyra as the fuel and Bekkit as the manipulator, Benin was little more than a conduit for this task. Though he was the caster, it was Bekkit who guided his magic, drawing on and refining the emberfox’s raw power to form a much more stable pair of portals than Benin would ever have managed on his own.
That didn’t mean he hadn’t contributed to the plan, however. He’d double-checked Arcane Sight’s description and confirmed that even though the Zolom couldn’t see, it could taste scents and feel vibrations. The lightning had left its tongue dangling uselessly from its bloody mouth, but there was one thing he knew of that even this snake wouldn’t be able to ignore.
The air beside Coll shimmered. The warrior raised his hammer.
“Now!”
Lila released the vines. They slithered from the giant snake and back into the earth. At the same time, Coll lifted his hammer with both hands and slammed it into the ground just behind the portal. “Hammer Smash!” he cried.
As it lunged toward the sound, the Zolom’s tail whipped. It was a reactive movement, a casual slap, but it knocked Lila to the ground, hard. Her head hit the rock with a sickening crack that made Benin wince to hear.
The serpent’s head disappeared through the portal. In the same instant, it reappeared, emerging from the paired portal. Benin had to crane his neck to see it; he’d placed the second portal—angled to face downward—as high up in the air and as far away from the mountainside as he could. Anything that emerged from it would go plunging straight to the ground hundreds of feet below. He was sure not even the legendary Zolom could survive something like that.
That was the theory, anyway.
But it really was a long snake. Its momentum did carry several feet of its body through the shimmering silver circle, but although its head hung confused from the distant portal, enough of its bulk remained on solid ground to stop it falling completely through. To Benin’s horror, it started to wriggle backward.
This wasn’t part of the plan.
He met Coll’s stare, expecting the warrior to look as horrified as he felt. But the big man just waggled his eyebrows at him.
What the hell is he—
Then he recalled a conversation they’d had after the river crossing. Coll had been full of inane questions about how the portals worked, because of course he had. One of those questions had been regarding what would happen if Coll stuck his arm through the portal—and what would happen if the portal then suddenly closed.
“Close it!” he yelled. “Close the portal!”
“It does not need to scream,” grumbled Bekkit. “Has it forgotten that I am right here?”
“Just do it!”
There was no dramatic flash this time, no spinning fire and furious water. The portals just… disappeared.
The Zolom’s upper body seemed to hang suspended in the air for a moment. Then it gave one final hiss and dropped beyond sight to smash apart on the ground below.
On the trail, the rest of its body writhed in the throes of death, as though refusing to come to terms with its end after all its decades of existence. Where the portal had closed, a perfect cross-section of the serpent’s body glistened in the starlight. It was like the Zolom had been sliced cleanly in half by a paper-thin guillotine blade.
We did it. We actually did it!
He tried not to imagine Tiri’s reaction when she learned they were probably responsible for the extinction of a lost species. He had bigger things to worry about right now.
“Lila, you
need to—damn it!”
He sprinted over to where she lay, still unconscious. He cursed himself for not asking her to do it sooner. Her switch in alliance to helping them had been so sudden, and her concentration on maintaining the vines so crucial to their plan, that he’d focused on removing the Zolom first.
“Wake up!” He slapped her cheek roughly. When she didn’t stir, he placed a hand gingerly on her chest and sent a spark of electricity into her.
She jerked, but did not awaken.
“That only works for drowning.”
“What?”
Coll stepped forward. “No point trying to restart her heart when it never stopped in the first place. For knocked-out, you need water.”
He upended his water flask over her head. She spluttered under the assault, turning her head to avoid it and wincing as she did so.
Benin crouched beside her. “Call it off.”
She blinked at him groggily. He clicked his fingers in front of her face until her eyes focused. “Lila! Whatever’s up there, call it off! Now!”
Sixty-Six
Enough
Corey
The skynet, launched from the repaired trebuchet, barely grazed one of the trogloraptor’s spiky knees before it flew over the edge of the trailhead and out of sight like a kamikaze ghost.
Its passing gave the trogloraptor pause. Then it was shrieking again as the still-glowing chemsphere came rolling toward it, flashing with every rotation. It was pursued by Swift and Cheer, both of whom were yelling “Whoa!” at the globe as though it were a runaway badger, despite that particular strategy having failed them every time in the past.
Ris’kin and I looked up at the trogloraptor, shrinking away from the light, and together we resolved to keep trying for as long as we both drew breath. Well, for as long as Ris’kin drew breath. I, of course, had no respiratory system to speak of.
