It felt like no matter the calamity, it always came down to running. Talia’s breaths came in short bursts, her heart beating hard in her breast. The frantic battering at her ribs pressed her onward, her vision tunnelling on the etched rune that seemed to beckon at her, inching closer and closer, but always just out of reach.
Running is the root of all evil.
The thought was accompanied by a burst of mania that would’ve erupted from her chest in a delirious laugh if it weren’t for the burning and heaving of her tired lungs. The arcanist shrugged Osra’s insensate body back into position, their lives entirely dependent on the surge of adrenalin jittering through Talia’s limbs.
Under her, the ancient bridge quaked, and Talia finally looked back.
Wyrr’s shrunken balls that’s a big fucker.
While she’d caught a glimpse of the magmamander when it ripped wagon six down into the deep, and she knew what they looked like in a general sense from Orval’s bestiary, she still wasn’t prepared for the embodiment of death that had just stepped onto the bridge behind her.
The beast was ponderous. Huge. But it didn’t tower, it occupied. It was twice as long as Talia’s house and half as tall, with skin that looked like it would’ve been smooth and elastic if not for the spikes and nubs of both bone and metal that poked from it like grotesque tumours. Its hind legs explained the lumbering speed at which it chased them, the flesh of its ‘thighs’ moulded into a pair of scoops perfect for propelling itself through thick magma.
Talia shuddered.
The similar fins that dotted what remained of its hide had all been sharpened to a wicked edge that gleamed from a reddish inner light that emanated from a ribcage that could probably fit half a wagon without chewing. It barely had a neck to connect its head to its torso. With the bony muzzle filled with multiple rows of metal teeth that had ripped through its jaw, the lack of a neck made it look more like a fat wyrm than the graceful magma-dweller it actually was. Its triangular snout had torn through the skin of its face in a gush of oily tar and pitch bone.
Combined with the uneven, asymmetrical metal claws that had ripped through the thick webbing on its paws and the infernal glow from inside its chest, it was nightmare fuel, the very thing people thought of when they said the word ‘demon’.
Nonetheless, if Talia squinted just right, she could see the remnants of the majestic beast that it had once been. The lines of its body, now corrupted into a jagged mess of angles and sharp edges, had once flowed into a sweeping elegance that abutted with the palmed tail that was now home to a fistful of arm-length sharpened spikes.
I know it was probably long dead to begin with, but in a way, it’s a little…sad.
Sad, bloodthirsty and currently hungering for her death.
Yeaaa…why don’t I save my pity for the actual people. The dead ones.
REEEAAAAAAARTTTHCCH
The bridge shook once more as the titanic being accelerated, its awkward gait only exacerbated by the haphazardness of exposed bone and dripping tar. It wasn’t fast by any means, but its bulk meant that it was eating up the intervening space deceptively quickly.
Talia’s gaze darted back to the rune in the centre of the bridge. The other delvers had all already passed her, sprinting past the halfway point toward the other side, where wagon seven awaited.
She was the last one.
A sharp spike of fear lanced through her, and she had to stop herself from looking back once more. A niggling thought quickly turned into a creeping worry and then into a cold realization: even if she made it to the explosive, with the creature’s current speed, it would get past it before it went off.
Talia would have to stall it somehow. She cursed herself for setting such a long timer on the improvised explosive. She’d made assumptions and—
What is it Reggie always says about assumptions? Something about an ass…
An odd streak of clarity made her realize that her thought process was getting…unhinged, but that didn’t matter. What mattered was triggering the explosive and plunging the slavering monstrosity behind her into the chasm below.
It was looking more and more like she would be joining it.
Sweat dripped down Talia’s scalp to sting at her eyes. Her hands shook at the very real prospect of her own mortality. In a way, it was…unsurprising. She’d survived things on the journey to the Dead City that by rights should’ve killed her. Now, Ishmael was coming to get her due.
Odd how when my life is on the line, the so-called gods are what I turn to.
Talia banished the odd non-sequitur for her thoughts once more, recognizing it as the avoidance tactic that it was in another uncharacteristic bout of self-awareness.
Focus, Tals. How do we get out of this? Think. Think.
The panic was building now, a toxic, existential brew she hadn’t felt since that fateful day standing at the cliff down into the Maw, the hidden leap of faith that had changed the course of her life and in a very real way, had directly led to this moment.
Behind her, the magmamander shrieked, its loping, stumbling gait eating up the metres between them.
Altering the enchantment was a no-go. She didn’t have the time or the ability to do it. She wouldn’t be able to outrun the abomination without dropping Osra, which was something she refused to contemplate. There was no sense in living, after all, if she couldn’t live with herself afterward. Pragmatically, cynically, she knew that it was the correct choice. The expedition would have little hope of retrieving the matrix core without a skilled arcanist. What was the life—one likely to be cut short anyway—of one mage girl, in the face of two hundred thousand souls?
If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.
As the panic spread to her hands, Talia ripped the very idea from her head, trampled it, set it on fire and tossed it down a pit.
I won’t sacrifice my friend just to save myself, no matter the theoretical stakes. So what does that leave me with?
As the rune on the floor got closer, the time to make a decision got slimmer and slimmer, leaving her with the obvious choice.
I have to delay it. Get Osra clear and hold it off until the bomb goes off.
Somehow.
Even as she came to the conclusion, Talia realized that no matter what happened, she likely wouldn’t be surviving the encounter. Either the magmamander swallowed her whole, making her defiance pointless, or she held it off until the waste incinerator exploded, and she got to experience first-hand what an arcanic resonance cascade felt like.
At least, in one scenario, the rest of the expedition survived.
The question was, how would she even go about it?
The arcanist was running on the dregs of mana that remained in her Core, equipped with nothing more than a belt knife, an uncharged wand, and her shielding artefact.
Briefly, she considered overloading the ancient gauntlet but decided against it. There was no guarantee that the blast would kill the gargantuan beast, and if it didn’t, she’d be left virtually defenceless.
Buuut…
Considering her shielding artefact gave her an idea, but there was no time to vet it.
She’d arrived.
Stumbling to stop and almost dropping Osra, Talia kneeled by the rune, activating it with a pitiful burst of mana that nonetheless cause it to light up, activating the bomb metres below her feet. Just like that, the clock was ticking.
Talia pulled deeply from what little strength she had left, the scar along her chest prickling angrily as she ran to get her friend clear.
This’ll have to do. Any more and the magmamander will pass the point of no return.
She skidded to a halt, crouching to lay the girl flat on the ground in the middle of the bridge. It wouldn’t do for her to get tossed over the side in the blast, after all. Then, giving her unconscious friend one last look, she turned around and sprint back toward the now-barrelling abomination.
----------------------------------------
Ooohhh gods if you exist, let me survive this. I don’t know how, but I don’t want to die.
Talia stood with her legs bent over the Old Dwarvish rune for ‘activate’. By her count, she had another seven and a half minutes before the bomb went off. Seven minutes and twenty-nine seconds. She had to stall the thing for seven minutes and twenty-eight seconds.
Past five, self-preservation wouldn’t matter anymore. She wouldn’t have time to get away.
Right now, she was banking on one last-ditch effort. Her shield artefact had already shown that it wasn’t strong enough to take a direct hit from so much mass. But maybe, just maybe, it could deflect it. At the right angle, she might even be able to send the bastard sailing over the side of the bridge and down into the cavern.
Activating it with a thought, she spread the shield out in a wedge of barely visible force.
The world shook under her feet.
The magmamander didn’t even slow, shooting down the road like a bolt from a ballista, with a hundred times the deadly force.
Until now, the shield had been able to shrug off almost all of the momentum from a blow, leaving Talia free to retaliate how she wanted.
Apparently, the limit for that particular feature was somewhere in the multi-ton, building-sized, beast-shaped projectile range. The magmamander slammed into Talia’s only remaining heirloom with the force of an earthquake come to life.
Immediately, the shield winked out of existence, the mana fuelling it consumed in the space of a millisecond. Talia was sent flying from the backlash of the impact, flung sideways into a stone guardrail and almost rendered unconscious on the spot. Agony spread its spiderweb tendrils across her back and into her neck, her brain rattling in her skull from the whiplash, adrenalin the only thing keeping her conscious.
But it worked.
Her fantasy of sending the beast flying over the edge was an obvious pipedream, but as it crashed into the unforgiving barrier, all of that mass and momentum acted against it. Whatever it had that passed for bones snapped like brittle slate with an audible crackle like a bundle of hard drearwood breaking, the damage so gruesome that if it had been a living being, Talia was sure that it would have died on the spot.
Unfortunately, the world had decreed that such an opponent would be too easy. Instead, the titanic beast was simply flung off course and launched on its side, its angry shriek enough to make Talia’s ears bleed. Three pairs of wickedly clawed legs scratched at the stone of the bridge, carving divots in the rock with otherworldly strength as it fought to right itself.
Six minutes and forty-six seconds.
Forty-five.
Forty-four.
Forty—
It got up. A mass of sludgy muscle and amalgamated bone and metal contorting in ways that shouldn’t be possible, rounding on her with a roar that she felt the heat of from metres away. Tarry oil, shining silver, dripped from where its ribs had shattered along with—
Is that fucking magma?! Oh, you have got to be kidding—
Scrabbling to her feet, Talia dived out of the way right as the beast projected a gobbet of the Under’s own blood right at the spot she’d been seconds before, the heat singing her hair and cooking the skin of her face even from far away. She screamed as stray splatters landed on the shoulder of her cloak, superheating the silverite scales in a matter of seconds and burning her flesh.
FUCK!
Rolling to her feet, Talia turned to face the hulking brute as it charged her, just narrowly rolling out of the way from a swipe from its wicked claws, only to find herself under the abomination.
Oh shit oh shit oh shit oh shit oh shit
Caution thrown to the wind, Talia ripped her wand from its holster and jammed it into the magmamander’s belly, pressing the first rune she could find, desperate to do something, anything to get it away from her.
Talia got a bare moment to gasp in pain as manaburn wracked her channels and Core before the world stuttered to a halt and her nerves were overwhelmed with raw agony that made manaburn feel like a gentle hug.
She couldn’t move. She couldn’t breathe or cry out or flinch. Her heart stopped and her mouth froze in a silent scream as her body was wracked with the full force of nature’s most primal rage.
Then it was over, and it was all Talia could do to roll out of the way, her body crying for mercy, as the beast fell limp against the floor with a thud. She lay there, her clothes steaming and smoking, feeling like she’d channelled the full force of an arcano-sun for a brief instant.
Her vision was filled with black and white spots. A tinny voice crackled and stuttered in the back of her mind, blaring a warning in unfamiliar words.
Tilting her head over, the spent psion looked at her foe with hope rushing through her veins to the rhythm of her faltering heartbeat. Sparks ran over its unmoving carcass, arcing to the floor and wriggling across it like a swarm of vicious insects.
For a moment, Talia allowed herself to believe that she’d killed it.
Then it moved, a low, gurgling growl rumbling from its chest.
So this is how it ends. It was a good run, I guess.
The magmamander tilted its head unnaturally, meeting her gaze with its own baleful glare, all malice and deep-rooted hunger. Its limbs twitched spasmodically as it turned to erase her from the face of existence.
Faced with the end, Talia found herself wondering if the corrupted sapients she’d fought were aware in any way.
Gods I hope not. That’d be a real bummer.
Manic laughter bubbled up in her throat as she faced her death with eyes open.