Nikola could hear the rush of her blood in her ears like a river. Her adrenaline was pumping through her, and although her body had healed thanks to the potion, her nerves were still singing from the sword that had sliced straight through her.
She had two potions left, but also, she had used two. At 83 percent health remaining, she was sitting on the precipice of the halfway point between life and death.
They had brought her HP down to 30 percent in seconds. They could do it again.
But when she had been looking to the exit for a way out, Nikola had seen how the floor looked with a hundred lights arcing downward, brightening the room.
She had seen where each opening in the glass sat, waiting.
The spheres of flame were still falling like bolts from the sky.
Nikola's eyes fell on her trusty cleaver, her old friend. By now, it would be ready to [Crunch] again.
The Butcher checked on the party of four and they looked to be preparing to unload their skills on her. Even in a room swirling with tornado-like flames, she was what they were focusing on. Good.
Most of the people in the room were still standing at the back of the room, lagging behind and waiting for somebody else to go first. Only a few brave souls had started to tiptoe across the invisible floor.
Remembering the layout of the swiss cheese glass, the former NPC hopped backward as the Archer shot a bolt toward her, and then again as the auburn-haired sword wielder lunged at her. He used his blade to try to fillet her, initiating shiny skill after shiny skill. The tip of his sword zipped and danced in front of her face like a firefly, snipping off little bits of the ends of her hairs. Unlike a firefly.
But she crossed the room nimbly backward, evading the strikes. Her mind's eye told her where every pitfall was, and her feet found only solid ground as she flowed through the room.
When she was getting close to the wall and her opponent was breathing raggedly, slowing down in his pursuit, Nikola stopped weaving and dodging. The two of them were out in the middle of the room, alone. It was now or never. She tightened her grip on her weapon and let loose with her [Crunch], surging forth with a powerful dash.
His face molded from one of predation to that of prey, his eyes shining with a gleam of fright. He tried to turn around, but there was no time.
She landed her blow just above his wrist with a blessed, snappy crunch. A ripple of splintering sounds traveled down his forearm all the way into his elbow, and she actually gasped at the sheer joy it brought her to see it wiggle in its brokenness.
"Fuck," he groaned through clenched teeth, his voice a high-pitched whine from the searing pain, "this is exactly what you kept getting us with before. Why can't you just use a health potion to heal the [Crippled] status? Makes no sense."
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Nikola didn't want to waste her [Crunching Cleave], so instead of replying she bolted through the air like a missile, landing squarely in the crowd. She found she could aim her trajectory, so she bounced through the space, leaving a cacophony of screams in her wake as she shattered arm after arm. Near the end of her arc she felt like a sick composer.
By the time she reached the other three in fox-boy's party, they had been alerted to her by the beautiful, unrestrained cries of the people she'd attacked. Many fell into the mass of well-equipped feet and didn't get back up. They had their weapons aimed for her center mass.
The Archer used a skill she'd never witnessed before, something like the one that had made the sky fill up with fire - but this time, arrows scattered through the sky like a deadly hail, bouncing off the ceiling.
Nikola, for but a moment, considered abandoning her charge and moving on to the next room. But if she never hit them, would they ever fall?
She allowed the tips of the arrows to bury themselves in her meat; a mere distraction on her journey through the air, but they did hurt like fuck as they each sunk in. She got to her three marks and got one man in before the next strike didn't [Cripple], and her [Crunching Cleave] ended. Her red cape fluttered down with her, falling lamely downward as her feet landed on the glass below.
The one she left [Crippled] fell forward and caught himself with his knee, shocked at the sudden, potent pain as he clutched his arm and bit back a scream. His bow fell from his hand, the accompanying arrow tumbling through a nearby hole. The other she had hit clapped a hand to his wound, trying to control the gushing blood.
Nikola pulled her foot back and gave the [Crippled] Archer a swift kick to his suffering face, driving him backward and into the hole.
"Wha--" he wailed, disoriented, before his voice became too far away from them to hear.
Then, like a flaming hot Cheeto that was also her saviour, a pillar of flame swooped in and separated her from her captors, hot and dangerous as it tore between them.
Nikola used the opportunity to turn tail and run while she was still ahead. There were three of them now, each one wounded but with an unknown amount of potions. Not to mention the rest of the room was full to the brim with struggling, rabid-looking adventurers. They had started to work their way through the room, slowly, though none had made it to the dark hallway at the end of the room.
She was about to change that.
Her mind had clung to the layout of the holes in the floor, absorbed it. Even now, when the mage's flames had disappeared and only the areas around the pillars were illuminated, she could see the swiss cheese holes in the floor in her brain.
She bent her knees and bounced into a sprint, leaping over two pits at once. The floor wobbled under her weight as she landed, but she was on to another spot before it could splinter. And another. People sprinkled around the room, inching blindly across it, watched with their mouths agape as she crossed the space in actual leaps and bounds, with not a lick of fear in her visage.
She bit her lip to keep a smile from creeping across her face when she set foot in the hall, the first of them all.
But her face fell when she heard a voice behind her, breathy and male.
"Thanks, I couldn't have made it here without you."