Daniel

Sweat stung Daniel’s eyes despite the cold. It wasn’t cardio or weightlifting that left him breathless, heart pounding. It was stress. Countering the Ice mage strained his awareness to the limit. He had to watch the whole battlefield.

An especially loud clap of fists on flesh from Wendi’s battle behind him distracted Daniel for an instant. Then a flick of Verglas’ wrist felled the pillar of Ice sheltering Paul. Daniel’s arm shot to the side, a handprint appearing on the pillar as his projection caught it. He thrust his fist to fling the pillar at the mage.

Verglas stopped it with a palm. Extreme opposing forces shattered the Ice into daggers. As Cassie flew by, the wizard flung the blades upward with a wave of his fingers.

Daniel swatted the daggers from the air with a projection and winced at a needle-sharp sting behind his eyes. He’d struggled to fully grasp the Intent of such a diffuse attack, his lack of experience costing him as Daniel failed to recoup a portion of the energy spent.

He had the tiger by the tail. Lose focus for an instant, lose his grip on the tail, and it’d slip away. He might not be able to recapture this feeling.

Naïveté cost him double as Verglas redirected the hail of crushed Ice daggers at the climbing Libra and Kaminoke.

Through torrential blasts of Water, a shower of sleet, and stray shots of flame and Lightning from the surrounding firefight, the two scaled the wall to Praxithea’s cave. Kenta’s shell of hair, which refused to contact Lea’s skin, shielded her from all directions as she worked. Meanwhile, seven wrecking ball caramboles spun at the entrance. Lea pulled with all their gravitational force and, to Daniel’s astonishment, sucked everything out of the cave in a colossal slurp.

Praxithea swung at the kids with her violet blade as she, a swimming pool of Water, and her beast mount cascaded in a short-lived waterfall. Lea and Kenta dodged the sword swing, the Kaminoke losing a few hair strands in the process. While the witch managed to control her descent onto the Stone mages’ platform, her Water splashed onto the Ice plain and froze.

Three caramboles blocked the firehose from one Water mage, and Kenta’s hair guarded their right flank as both kids readied their attacks. Finally, Lea gathered four caramboles into a ram, Kenta balled his hair into a fist, and together, they slammed everything they had into the thin wall of the vacated hollow. Daniel heard a crunch, then the distant thud of falling rocks.

They’d broken through the wall.

“You want to interrupt? Fine, we’ll play with you instead!”

Daniel glanced in the voice’s direction to find Vlam and Rasant had changed targets. Paul’s metal body tolerated heat and electricity much better than flesh, but the lantern boy made a show of flinching at every fireball and zap that struck home. The mages saw Paul running in fear but didn’t notice how the boy kept them between himself and the Bear—the Elemental under orders not to harm the mages.

Cassie circled the arena, and the Wolf fired shot after shot at her, heedless of collateral damage. Mammoth orbs of compressed air detonated like bombshells, leaving clouds of dirt wherever they struck the ground or wall and raining debris on bystander mages.

Raging at the sight, Verglas made to strike, and Daniel raised his hand in response.

“I’m done playing games,” Verglas said as he extended his arms.

The air temperature dropped a hundred degrees in a second.

Before, it had been a bearable cold. Now Daniel’s jaw chattered hard enough to crack a tooth. White Ice spread thick along the ground from Verglas, up the platform, and climbed the wall.

Kleodora and her Stone partner levitated on rocks, and Praxithea did the same with a bubble of Water, but, separated from their Elements, none of the three could fight. Verglas no longer cared how his magic affected them.

Lea and Kenta ducked through the hole in the wall before the Ice reached them, but the other two Water mages were sealed inside their caves by a layer of frost. The Bear crunched through the Ice, not bothered at all. While Vlam and Rasant rose above the chill, Paul slowed, and his joints groaned in protest as cold seeped into metal.

The lantern boy would freeze solid in minutes.

Daniel had to do something, but there was nothing to fight. No pillars of Ice being tossed about, nothing for him to break, unless… Daniel fell to his knees and placed his freezing palms flat on the Ice. He closed his eyes and pictured the white field as a single object.

One thing to break.

He imagined the battlefield from Cassie’s perspective high above. From this mind’s-eye view, he envisioned his hand gripping the disk of the white field and squeezed.

He put himself in Verglas’ shoes and guessed at what went through that evil man’s brain. He thought of Ice and how it spread, the Will in it, the way it drained energy at a touch, the way the cold slithered through all defenses, and he squeezed.

The ground trembled, and his mind’s eye saw five fingerprints the size of tractor-trailers form on the edges of the field—his fingerprints. The Ice shook and cracked. Power flowed into him even as he poured it into the projection.

“That’s enough out of you, boy,” Verglas said.

“Don’t try to beat him!” Cassie had said.

No, Cassie was yelling at him right now, “Run, Daniel, get out of there! Someone help him! Help Daniel! Save him!”

Save me? Daniel thought to himself, From what? He opened his eyes.

Verglas held a green spear in his left hand. The twelfth spear. The wizard had kept his in reserve. And now he threw it.

A ray of heat struck the spear, peeling Letter tiles from the hard-light mosaic, but it didn’t have enough time to reach the Taotie core. Paul had lost precious moments fighting the cold to raise his arm. The spear flew on.

Daniel mentally grabbed at the spear, but the green shaft sheared smoothly through his projection—leaving a quarter-sized hole in the palm. The spear flew on.

Rana appeared from nowhere to tackle him, shouldering him away even if it meant the spear would strike her instead. But the spear had been set on Daniel and, in the final hour, curved midflight.

The spear hesitated a centimeter from his skin for a fraction of a second. Daniel’s passive shield resisted it, spewing dust as it drained his power for protection. He felt the strength go out of his working on the field, out of his arms, and out of his legs as his head filled with needles. The tip of the spear disintegrated, and the first few inches of the shaft were eaten away, but the jagged edge and its momentum remained.

The spear had one purpose in existence: to strike.

And it struck.

Daniel’s blood melted the shaft and the Taotie mask inside and the Mani core and the Ice beneath him and the ground beneath the Ice. And Daniel fell on his side.

He stayed conscious, though his world grew very cold. He knew he was bleeding, and nothing could stop the bleeding, and that meant he had mere minutes to live if no one brought him a healing coin.

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They had lost.

The others couldn’t rescue him in time. Verglas would hold Daniel’s life hostage to make the others surrender.

And they’d surrender for him, even Kenta—the Kaminoke never left a friend behind.

They’d be separated and forced into evil work like Tesem, and things would be very bad for a very long time, but they’d live. Then, one day, no matter how many years it took, they’d find each other again.

That thought kept him from calling Perses.

He looked up, and Rana stood over him. Their eyes met. She favored one leg because of a hurt foot, she bled from spear wounds and cracked frostbitten flesh, and her cream-pale throat had turned blue with cold. She was shivering and fragile and weak.

And she was crying. Real tears of anguish. He’d never seen her cry before. Well, unless he counted that time she’d shed a tear of joy over a slice of pizza.

Daniel quirked a smile thinking of that, and tears trickled down his cheek. She saw him smiling and crying with her as if apologizing, and she didn’t look away. Her face said they were thinking the exact same thing, ‘I don’t want to say goodbye.’

She closed her eyes and lowered her head. Then she put both bare feet flat on the Ice. This struck Daniel as important. He knew she hated the cold from when they’d played in the snow. It had to be excruciating for her, yet it was as if she didn’t feel it now.

Rana sucked in air, lifted her head, and yelled. She yelled, not for the pain of her flesh or mere frustration, but with bottomless rage and the raw untouched pain of her heart and complete denial.

Except, as she continued her unbroken shout, the sound didn’t get softer and weaker until she ran out of breath. No, her voice grew louder as she filled it with more emotion. It was like listening to her vomit the accumulated gunk and bile of her soul. Rana’s voice soared louder and louder until the rocks and Ice reverberated with its sound. Her aura glowed with intense magic, but Daniel’s Eye of Ruin didn’t see Rana’s voice cause any damage. This wasn’t an attack.

Everyone stopped mid-battle to watch Rana. The mages tensed, vigilant for a sign of violence that would never come. Her friends stared in disbelief; they hardly heard her raise her voice, let alone yell. Even the ageless eternal Elementals of Wind and Stone, Wolf and Bear, paused to acknowledge her.

And still, she grew louder. It should’ve become painful but never did—the sound wasn’t auditory. As Rana’s ascending Voice entered the realm of jet planes, roaring waterfalls, and cascading sonic booms, all the ugliness and anger bled clean. Somewhere along the way, she seemed to forget why she’d yelled in the first place, and—at the very end, for a moment—it became something new.

The final resonant peal seemed to go on forever. At the abrupt cutoff, Daniel slammed back to the reality of the pain of his wounds and the frustration of their struggle with the suddenness of a hypnotist snapping their fingers.

Without him noticing, Rana had changed. She’d doubled in height. Her skin was grey and covered in wartlike knots, except her chest and belly had turned dark fiery orange. Her arms and legs bulged with muscles, her shoulders broadened, and her chest deepened. While her body remained humanoid, it lacked all femininity. A wide toad’s head topped her torso.

She opened her eyes, and they were the same intricate mosaic of green and gold he knew. The mounting horror inside him eased—she was herself in there. When she glanced at him, Daniel saw even in her alien features how the sight of his blood pained her.

Rana turned to face Verglas.

When her eyes met the Ice mage’s, they clouded to the quiet red of cold-blooded murder. Daniel bit his lip, knowing no words could stop Rana’s inexorable advance as she trailed bloody footprints on the Ice.

“Oh no, we’re so scared,” Ansbach’s voice dripped with sarcasm. “Seriously, you think we’re worried you turned half-toad? You’re not a real monster.”

She stopped and assumed her battle stance. Verglas donned a red shield in his left hand and held it between himself and the toad girl, his cold eyes locked with her red.

Ansbach seemed offended. “Don’t humor her,” he shouted at the other mages. “What is she going to do? Spray slime—?” The Wind mage never finished his sentence.

Rana pumped her arms, thrusting palms to shoot a glob of slime at each enemy mage. The magic users saw this coming and confidently summoned their shields and barriers. Then, midflight, something happened to the slime.

Inside each glob appeared a speck. The specks grew into dots, then tadpoles, which absorbed the slime as they became adult toads tumbling head over heels through the air. As the toads neared their targets, they spat another glob of slime to the side.

The mages hadn’t prepared for this. As these secondary globs of slime grew into toads, they had flanking positions on their targets and unobstructed angles behind the mages’ defenses. The secondary toads spat their globs of slime at the mages’ faces.

It happened so quickly the mages couldn’t defend against the tertiary slime globs. Instead, they shifted their shields an instant too late.

At first, Daniel didn’t understand why Rana hadn’t done this from the beginning. He knew she could make slime and frogs; this wasn’t that far a stretch from what she’d been doing for days. Though the feat of concentration impressed, it certainly didn’t require a massive amount of energy. He understood when he saw the mages’ reactions.

Instinctively, they dropped their shields to free a hand—but they couldn’t wipe away sticky slime. Their eyes, noses, and mouths were blocked, with many a hand glued to their face. For all their power and magic, they had each once been human. Even mages needed to breathe.

This was the first lethal attack of the battle.

As strange as it seemed, all the mages’ attacks were meant to subdue. Burns and cuts could be healed. Even Daniel’s ‘mortal’ wound had been to the chest, leaving a window for treatment. Verglas would’ve aimed for Daniel’s head if he’d intended to kill.

Rana wasn’t distracting the mages or restraining them. This was pulling a knife in a fistfight.

Her voice, a year distant, echoed in his mind. “Monsters are feared for their lack of inhibitions. Everyone has inner boundaries, whether squeamishness, common decency, or moral code. A monster uses their abilities’ maximum potential to do things we’d never consider. A monster doesn’t care about law, honor, or anything except their obsession. No underhanded trick is beneath them. No heinous act is unthinkable. No hesitation.”

If the mages were once human, how much humanity remained? It varied. The Stone mages conjured dirt they frantically rubbed into the slime, though their movements stayed vigorous. Praxithea was unaffected inside her Water bubble, able to hold her breath for minutes. And, while the mages on the wall were too far for Rana to reach, she’d gotten both Rasant and Vlam.

The desperate cobalt mage’s fingers flashed with electricity as he tore at his face with both hands. He rode a flying beast, also blinded by slime, but they’d stay in the air a few seconds more.

The scarlet mage was smothered like a snuffed candle and fell from the sky. Vlam had mere moments to burn the slime off her face with what little Fire remained to her before hitting the ground. It made sense to Daniel that a being of flame would depend on fresh air.

In part, the pain made his observations distant. He didn’t feel concerned about whether the cruel woman lived or died until he remembered the other thing Rana had said.

“If a demon is pure evil, a monster is pure insanity. A narrow mind that sacrificed humanity to its fixation. Most monsters bear a distinct mark, red eyes. Monster Shifters, it’s said, are cursed to never regain their humanoid form after committing a Taboo.”

Suddenly, Daniel wasn’t afraid for himself. He worried, ‘What if one of the mages died because of Rana? What if she went too far and couldn’t come back?’

His eyes shot to Vlam as she plummeted while scraping soot from her face and gasping for air. She righted herself with jets of flame a foot above the hard Ice. And then Daniel thought, If they weren’t trying to kill us before, what about now?

Among the mages, Verglas alone refused to drop his weapons. His inability to breathe or see through the slime covering his face didn’t seem to alarm him at all. Maybe the Ice mage’s cold-blooded heart was frozen. Or maybe his slow metabolism let him hold his breath for hours. Either way, the white-armored wizard wasn’t fazed.

Then Rana shot out her tongue. Not at Verglas, but Tom the Stone mage. While his eyes were blinded, Second Sight worked through shut eyelids. The ochre mage sensed the nearing projectile and ripped rocks from the wall to cover himself in a protective layer. Rana’s tongue wrapped around rock as well as man, adhering with sticky slime.

Rana the frog girl couldn’t have moved that much weight with her tongue, but her Toad form was much bigger and much stronger. So, with a deep squat, she hopped away, pulling along the floating mage tied to the toad by her tongue. Then Rana landed and jumped again, her path a ‘V.’

As the mage in a boulder followed, his path curved. Next, she planted her feet and braced herself. Tom’s momentum carried him in an arc as she pulled with her tongue. Rana spun on her heels, swinging the boulder around to build speed. At last, she released, her tongue’s slime switched to ‘slick’ and slid off as she reeled it in.

Dizzy, blind, and no tactical genius, the clueless Stone mage chose to stay safe inside his shell of rock.

Meanwhile, Verglas’ Second Sight sensed something large and magical on a collision course.

Maybe Verglas didn’t know what Rana had done. Maybe he didn’t use his light gem because he’d have to drop either the shield or sword to free a hand. Maybe he didn’t block with his red shield because it’d take a huge amount of energy to deflect the boulder. Or maybe Verglas was just angry and looking for an opportunity to use that special, expensive-looking sword. Daniel couldn’t know for certain, but the Ice mage never hesitated.

Verglas swung his blade of otherworldly metal and neatly cleaved the boulder in two, the halves parting to land on opposite sides of his mount. Flecks of red sprinkled the white wizard’s armor.

Daniel didn’t have time to consider what this meant for Rana as a rumbling roar shook the battlefield.

Verglas sat stunned, having realized the full ramifications of his actions and how badly they’d underestimated the cleverness of one frog. Rana had determined by process of elimination who held the Elemental’s leash, and now those hands hung limp in a pool of blood.

The Bear was loose. And it was mad.

The Elemental slammed its paws on the ground, and the field of Ice shattered.

Daniel’s consciousness faded. The last thing he heard before blacking out was the sounds of footsteps on Ice behind him.