The spark-shield roared down at us, solid as a brick wall, electric as sticking my tongue in an outlet. I took the brunt of the blow because I was standing in front with Wren, and was six inches taller than her. The impact felt like a sledgehammer to the top of my head. Pain exploded into my shoulders and then into my side when the shield slammed me to the rough plank floor. Then I felt sparks sizzling across me.

That first blow of Kathina’s shield would’ve broken my neck if not for all those points of Fortitude. Hell, I wasn’t sure that it hadn’t broken my neck. I’d definitely heard bones snapping, though through the fog of pain I wasn’t sure which ones.

Health 27/57

A single surprise blow--and electrocution--had erased half my health.

The spark-shield hit Tansy next. The impact wasn’t quite as forceful, because I’d absorbed most of the momentum with my skull, but she still dropped like a sack of elephant shit. She managed to collapse on top of Usim, though, even as she twitched and screamed. She protected him from the battering-ram force of the shield, if not the sparks.

Kathina’s shield slowed after hitting us, which gave Wren time to throw herself sideways. She moved fast, but without her gem active she wasn’t quick enough to avoid the crossbow bolts. Three pierced her from above, while a few more jabbed into the worn wooden floor underfoot. One sunk into the flesh at her collarbone, one tore into her thigh, and the third ripped through her ear and into the base of her neck. Death blows, if she hadn’t been gemmed.

She cried out in pain and started growing as I spun dizzily, weeping in pain, seeing double, desperate to drag Tansy and Usim out of this deathtrap.

“Alex, go up!” Wren gasped at me while she moved to cover her son.

I barely comprehended the words, but some animal instinct inside me--which may or may not have been Princess--listened.

I turned to smoke, which offered blessed relief from the pain and reeling panic. I started rising before understanding what was happening, or how ... and finally got a sense of the situation. Kathina and her remaining Sixers were hunched on segment of the broken stairwell above and barely behind us, where the outer shell of the lighthouse started curving around. The soldiers were dropping crossbows instead of reloading them, and grabbing-preloaded one instead, to keep firing. Which meant we didn’t even have three seconds before the next volley.

I didn’t see Jikap, the white infenti twin, so maybe that kobold had actually eaten his head. That was a silver lining. Except I didn’t see Tiral-ur, either, and I knew he’d survived. There was nothing in this valley that could scratch him, much less kill him.

Standing on a half-broken landing above me, Kathina looked wild and powerful, surrounded by sparks as rage shone in her faceted face. The tatters of her once-ruffled dress was now an arcane, blood-splattered cloak.

INTUIT: Infenti, Level 16

What the hell? Hadn’t she been level 14 or 15 when I’d last checked? She’d leveled up? When had that happened?

She was exactly twice my level now, and it showed. She burned with power. The air crackled around her and she reshaped her shield closer to herself as I drifted higher.

I didn’t feel pain, not exactly, but I felt ... disturbance. Interference. An unsettling tingle as I wafted through the sparks that spat from the shield.

Health 22/57

Mana 8/24

Shit.

I reached for the nearest freestanding segment of stairs with one smoky arm and another barrage of bolts shot through me--then a greenish object dropped from the sky, from the center of the lighthouse, like a fucking meteor.

Turning solid, I grabbed the stairs with both hands and threw myself upward, effortless as an Olympic athlete, into the thick of the soldiers.

The falling object blurred past me and slammed the lighthouse’s wood-planked floor. And into Wren, who was full-sized and shoving Tansy and Usim back through the exit. The deafening crack of impact felt like a shock wave.

The sound echoed and a dust cloud rose, then Tiral-ur stood from Wren. He must’ve dropped on her from the highest section of lighthouse stairway. The floor trembled and creaked beneath him, the wood straining, and the planks cracked but didn’t quite break. The fall hadn’t hurt him, of course. Not more than a few scuffs, at least. But Wren, even at her full size, had taken a beating. Blood oozed from her mouth and her left arm hung at a bad angle and one of her ankles looked like a goddamn vault had fallen on it.

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

She didn’t give up, though. She straightened--well, except for her broken arm and her horribly-twisted ankle--and stood at the door, her weight on one leg, protecting her son outside. Tiral-ur drew his mace--apparently a backup mace--and I didn’t see anything more.

Not down below me.

Because I was too busy leaping into the middle of a bunch of elite Sixer soldiers. I slashed at one with a hatchet but there was no room to maneuver on this narrow ledge of stairway, so my blow didn’t penetrate his armor deeply. Another stomped toward the back of my knee while a third swung her crossbow at my face. Webtouch gave me an instant’s warning so I spun and hacked and took the kick in my thigh--which fucking hurt--while the crossbow glanced off the dome of my head, which also fucking hurt. My backswing chopped into an artery though. Blood squirted everywhere like bad horror show special effects, and I lunged at Kathina because if I didn’t stop her there was no point--and her spark-shield slammed me and all of her soldiers off the stairs.

We rained around Tiral-ur, who was clubbing Wren’s forearm into paste. At least we distracted him for just long enough for Wren to throw her second-to-last gold bead into her mouth. I hit the ground hard, then a falling soldier slammed into me, her knee smashing my ribs like a hammer. My vision swam for a second, but my webtouch observed Wren blocking the crachen’s next swing.

Then Kathina’s full-powered shield swept down from above as she--

As she lowered toward us like fucking Magneto, just floating downward in mid-air, like she could stay centered inside her shield while she blasted Wren with what looked like a full bolt of lightning.

Wren staggered and Tiral-ur hit her again and I threw the soldier aside and jumped at Kathina and rammed right into her shield.

Health 9/57

Yeah, I immediately domained a gold bead into my mouth and swallowed and shoved off the shield toward Tiral-ur. I couldn’t touch Kathina, not until her mana drained, so instead I threw myself at the invulnerable crachen. And I hated to admit this, but I’d learned something from those kobolds. If you couldn’t break through someone’s defenses, you needed to immobilize them instead.

So I didn’t bother hacking at Tiralk-ur, I just wrapped myself around him like a monkey, my stomach pressed to his back as he faced the other direction, fighting Wren. He was stronger than me, but not by much, and I took a firm grip around his torso, locking myself in place. His pincer arm flailed at me but didn’t have the leverage to do much damage, and I wrapped one calf around his leg, limiting his mobility and balance exactly as my arms were limiting his reach and speed.

Wren wiped the blood from a mace-gouge on her chin and smiled at him with all her teeth. Like a full-on T-Rex. Then she blocked his next mace swipe--which was feeble, with me limiting his range of motion--and stepped inside and her tail came out of nowhere and whipcracked against his face.

He didn’t falter. He just made the faintest ‘oof’ and tried to scrape me off his back as the soldiers around us rose unsteadily to their feet.

Wren’s tail hit him three more times, moving in a blur, then her elbow came out of nowhere and caught him just under the clamshell-chin.

That time he staggered backward a foot. I would’ve cheered, but at that moment a throwing knife lodged an inch into my hardened skin, from one of the soldiers behind me. The others prepared to engage me with melee weapons, and through the grunting and swearing, I heard Tansy and Usim shouting at us from outside. Shouting urgently, but I couldn’t make out the words, I didn’t have time to listen.

Wren pivoted and slammed Tiral-ur one more time with her tail, hard enough to crack stone--but still only hard enough to ding Tiral-ur. A spear-head jabbed into my lower back, maybe into my kidney, and the pain was exquisite so I turned to smoke--an instant before three guards finished me with a frenzy of slashing and skewering.

Their spears and swords hit Tiral-ur, instead, and didn’t even scuff his carapace.

I spread myself thin on the floor, clinging to the cracks between the overstressed planks, moving toward Kathina. She blasted Wren again, with a pseudopod of her buzzing shield that bulged over the fighting and caught Wren’s horned head.

The flash of electricity almost dazzled me, Wren dropped to her knees, and Usim bolted back inside, with Tansy two feet behind him. Back inside? Yeah, back inside to the deadly battle. What the hell? What in all the smoky hells of the floating islands would they do that for? And they didn’t even stop to fight! Tansy, who loved a good scrap, didn’t so much as trip one of the Sixers.

Instead, they sprinted across the floor, though the bladed, smokey, sizzling chaos, toward the far wall of the lighthouse. And then, with what looked like a last gasp of effort, Wren lunged blindly after them, following her son’s voice across the steeple and away from the entrance.

Which was bizarre, but I didn’t have a chance to unpuzzle that particular mystery. I was too busy condensing my body inside Wren’s shield. Like three inches from her tattered gown. Her shield covered her pretty well, but it wasn’t airtight against the ground--and when I turned to smoke I basically was air.

She froze for a moment, staring in horror at the entrance to the lighthouse, then I appeared so close to her that I didn’t even have room for a hatchet swing. So I punched her in the stomach instead, with every ounce of hatred and every point of Strength.

She folded forward, gasping and coughing, and I summoned a hatchet to finish her ...

That’s when I felt the chill, a biting cold. And realized that the wraith had drifted into the lighthouse behind me. Slow and steady, and apparently not unwilling to travel away from its pit.

It glided through the entrance on ethereal lumps, ghostly and semi-transparent and composed of horrible eyeless eels that stretched and writhed and uncoiled. At first, it stood about Usim’s height, then it lengthened to my height, then shrunk, then lengthened to maybe ten feet tall, a long slender figure of pulsating eels and icy breath.

A throwing knife spun through the wraith like it wasn’t there, and tanged against the stone wall beside the exit.

One serpentine limb stretched outward, shot at a Sixer soldier ... and disappeared into his stomach. There was no blood. There was no wound. The wraith’s ‘eel’ simply occupied same space as the solider, who started shrieking and ... and sort of compacted into himself. His bones cracked and his flesh burst, like a terrible pressure was squeezing him into a three inch radius where the eel was touching him.

Not fast, either. He screamed and screamed and the wraith moved past him, one eel lagging behind to crush that guy while the other eel-limbs groped for the other soldiers--and for Kathina.

And me.