Elwin took a step back, his head seized by a peculiar intuition.
No, they wouldn’t, Elwin thought. He shook his head and looked deeply into her eyes.
“They would not. Because Professor Aionia is... well, we know of her ideals without explaining. And Professor Irina is a doctor, who swore an oath to not take a life, or allow events to come to harm that would take people’s lives...”
“That’s what I thought too,” replied Mirai. “It’s why I think this final challenge coming out of the blue is more than a little suspicious.”
Elwin nodded along. “Yeah, it would have to mean that either Professor Aionia, Irina, and others haven’t been made aware of this duel to the death, or...”
“Or this is something of Professor Thales’s own making, diverging from the plan.”
“But why?” Elwin mused, glancing into the dark.
“Getting to the point,” Mirai hurried, quickening her whisper, “ever since Professor Thales got here, I’ve had an uneasy feeling in my gut, even before he announced the duel to the death. It’s almost as if he is hiding something from us.”
Elwin gulped. “What would that mean?”
“Do you remember what Hûnbaba mentioned? He said there were seventeen that entered the city, and he said one felt like a foul presence. I know not for sure, it’s just a feeling, but the thought strikes me... what if Professor Thales is indeed the Foul Presence that Hûnbaba warned us about?”
A shudder ran down them both.
“Then the question would be whether Professor Thales as the Foul Presence had powers we don’t know about, right? Powers which would be difficult for us to defend against?” Elwin suggested.
“Yeah. But from how Hûnbaba said the Foul Presence remains cleverly out of his reach, it might be that –”
“DON’T MAKE ME PLUCK YOU ONE BY ONE, DEAR ARTENS,” rang Professor Thales’s voice through the hall into the crypt.
Elwin coughed, and spat a cup’s worth of blood from his lungs, kneeling to the floor. She helped him up by the waist.
“Sorry... Mirai, focus on the battle for now. We’ll figure something out if things go awry. Thanks for being by my side.”
* * *
Professor Thales surveyed the battle-group of students in the tiled basalt across the subterranean canal.
Everyone – Elwin’s kismets, Robert’s squadra, Lucian’s clique, and Khan’s retinue, stood ready in their battle stances, the Torch Bearers in front, supported by the Tide Controllers to the sides and Artillery Guardians at the back, with Eagle Watchers spread loose between to screen incoming projectiles.
“So, you have chosen to fight in formations?” He remarked solemnly. “As expected of Artens of Aeternitas. Now that you are here,” he acknowledged, tendrils of water from the channel flowing into a sphere around him, shaping themselves into appendages of an octopus that stretched several yards –
“We may begin.”
With the dim light of that city under earth, the water looked utterly black, as black as ink.
“HOORAH!”
“AAAAAAHHHHHHHH!”
They made a combined battle cry as Professor Thales shot a single appendage of water like a thick rope across the channel and latched onto Mirai, nearly knocking everyone back; Elwin and the Tide Controllers around him snapped it away as quickly as they could, before he cracked another appendage like a whip and threw at the shields of multiple torch bearers, the air whistling with the speed of projection; the Artillery Guardians quickly turned it into steam before it could arrive.
It was their turn to counterattack.
“NOW!”
The Tide Controllers rhythmed several ponds’ worth of water into floating spheres and hurled it towards Professor Thales; Professor Thales laughed as he wrested control of the water, but that wasn’t their main plan.
With a flurry of perfectly coordinated dancesteps the Artillery Guardians ignited several fireballs’ worth of power behind the water, blasting the mass into steam in an instant which covered him; and as planned, Mirai and the Torch Bearers flung the razor-sharp glaives into the hot fog, hoping one of them would maim Professor Thales, for he would not see them coming.
But all of a sudden the steam blasted itself away in a gale that knocked everyone off their feet and shattered their formations.
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Professor Thales’s figure emerged in the dark, shadows draped all over his face except for his eyes of cold blue. Suspended in air next to his hands were four metal glaives, enclosed in discs of even sharper ice.
“Good trick,” he said, hurling it towards their necks with a velocity too fast to melt nor stop. Elwin grimaced and barely deflected it with his shield of frying pans with his right arm, making a terrific spark as it scratched off the metal in bits and flew off into the night; Mirai blocked it at the last second, but Khan was grazed in the leg armor, which instantly shattered, blood beginning to seep from his shins. If he was hit in the neck, then...
Without a moment to spare, the Eagle Watchers pulled him behind for first aid while the flurry of barrages continued.
Professor Thales was a demon in the Mashurmastra. What Maximus ever demonstrated paled in comparison to the shapes the professor could conjure, the speed at which he could shape them, and the size of the weapons he could devise. He threw not one but seventeen lances of frost at them all at once, blocked only at the last second because they dived behind a pillar in formation; he threw glaives of ice that did not follow a straight path, but curved and homed in on them like no weapon they had ever seen, even from a hundred feet away; icicles fell from the ceiling which the Artillery Guardians had to melt with their screens of fire; and this was only Professor Thales’s ranged assault. He could have obliterated Ursus one-on-one in less than a minute if he’d fought at range.
Elwin had no idea how fast or good of a melee combatant the Master of Waters could be, and in fact he looked quite frail, but he knew by instinct that his many layered battle-robes concealed tools of ice, water, and poison at his disposal which could eviscerate him if he approached too close, which could skewer his eyeball like popsicles. To think that he had the audacity to appear benevolent when the eyewrap fell off of him! That traitor, that monster of the Order!
They had to survive at all costs, and all around them their hairs and faces were dusted with frost, snow, and soot, muscles straining to hold the defense against assault that bordered on the divine. Elwin never knew how high of a ceiling in skill that professors possessed, because in class they would only witness a fraction; now he knew, now he knew with his bones.
A colossal waterspout began to head their way, ripping apart the basalt tiles like crackers, swirling their jagged edges as free-moving knives.
“WATERSPOUT!”
“ZAHN, ZAHN, FURA AMPARA!”
Isaac and Cassius coaxed the currents of air within to rotate in an anticyclone, slowing the mass of the water; Katherine and three other Artillery Guardians blew it apart with steam, and the Torch Bearers shielded the brunt of the hurtling tiles with their metal shields.
But when the tornado had dissipated Professor Thales was right on top of them, looming over them like a shadowed deity, with a warhammer of frost in his hand; without even a moment to react he brought it sideways into Robert and his shield, shattering it and ragdolling him twenty yards on the ripped basalt, tearing his uniform in jagged edges.
“SINGLE COLUMN!”
“SINGLE COLUMN!”
Elwin hollered, as they retreated as fast as they could and regrouped, to reduce the area that Professor Thales could hit with melee. But to everyone’s dismay the professor was now approaching Robert to finish him off, warhammer in hand. His back was fully turned, as if all fifteen of them were not even a threat.
“– NO!” Marcus and Rafia bellowed, racing bravely with their shields to tackle Professor Thales, who did not react other than to lift them from the ground with a tentacle of water, and with a snap of finger hurled them aside as one tosses clothes; but then, unbeknownst to anyone, Lucian had broken free of the formation, had climbed one of the pillars, and was jumping on top of Professor Thales like a panther from a tree, in his hand the obsidian blade that had tumbled from Robert's pockets –
“AFTER ALL YOU’VE FORCED ME TO DO AND SEEN ME DO –”
He roared, diving into Thales’s exposed head;
“YOU CALL ME UNWORTHY, THALES?”
But a single snap of the finger opened his robes to reveal a hundred blades of frost, which was going to skewer Lucian’s throat and heart, which was –
A metal shield flew between them at the last moment, the frostblades crushing the shield but sparing Lucian; Mirai’s arm was outstretched, having thrown it with all her might.
And in the fraction of a second where Professor Thales couldn’t react, Lucian plunged his obsidian blade deep into Professor Thales’s shoulder, and with the continuing momentum of his dive, held it with both hands and carved it across his back and waist, finishing by pulling it out and skidding to the side, a grin upon his face.
The Professor made a deafening roar, a roar so colossal that it shook the very halls and the earth itself; in fact, the primal scream was made known in their heads like Hûnbaba’s.
That’s when everyone saw it.
From the lengthy gash where blood must have burst, a sickening ooze of purple and black began to foam and liquify like tar. An odious stench immediately filled the hall; and before they knew it, Professor Thales was human no more, the ooze of his wound escaping into atmosphere around them, engulfing him, enveloping him, stretching into that sky below earth, until his head and body had all but disappeared and the sick, violet-black miasma began to take on a monster whose form held the jaws of an ancient cobra and its body a centipede that lived a thousand years, its numerous tails lodged with material spikes hewn from tiles of basalt, its claws as heinous as diamond to quartz.
It reared on its tail and insectoid legs, shrouding all of the hall in a shadow so absolute it made them choke, coming to the height of nearly a quarter of the roof, as tall as Hûnbaba, the great spirit.
Every soul that watched was arrested in shock, convulsing on the spot as if a seizure had come over them all. Many among them fainted and collapsed where they stood; the few that remained standing uttered words over and over, hoping that denial would correct the new reality they now faced.
“Wha – what’s – what’s all this... what even is... Hey, Elwin! ELWIN!” Cassius grabbed Elwin by the lapel and spat into him.
“WHAT’S THIS? YOU PROMISED US THAT NO ONE WOULD DIE! BUT WHAT IN THE NINE NARAKS IS THIS? WHAT DID YOU DO? WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?”
Isaac stammered likewise, but to himself.
“They were just stories... they were just stories made to scare children... everything we’ve been told... was the truth...? This – this is what awaits us? This is what we are destined to fight?”
A flash of understanding struck Elwin’s thoughts, surfacing upon the water the words he had forgotten in his want to overcome Lucian, in his thirst to prove himself.
His father had warned him that there was more to the world than he could ever imagine.
This was the enemy that his father had warned him about in his letters.
“AS YOU INSIST,” the demon whispered in a chitinous growl, its numerous cockroach-like scales crunching as it coiled across the pillars, facing them all.
“HERE I AM.”