As soon as Tanya cracked open the door, the chanting began.
It would have been much more impressive to Nathan if he weren’t being fed the meaning of the language by extrasupernatural phenomena. The sonorous, liquid tones coming from the other room, rolling over the two adventures and the Millionborn like the advent of their doom, were in the ancient and forgotten divine liturgical language of the arcane, the words with which the universe itself had been wrought; but the Creation was long past, and the sacred Names invoked had lost their power millennia since.
“Edinburr Augsburg Trondheim Londoh Albyon Tudors,” the voices intoned in seven-party shifting semi-harmony, raising hairs along the necks and arms of their listeners. “King Philip Papist tyrand Mary Queen of Scoths Madrid!”
“Hang on,” Nathan objected absently, “I’m pretty sure I’ve seen that before in some sort of song or book. Also, what’s up with the music? Boss fight incoming?”
“Similarity’s probably just a coincidence,” Tanya said dismissively. “That happens a lot here, everything always turns out to be one. This? This is just the usual shit. Epic doom-and-whatever chanting, so Honey was right about it not being a Champion.” She poked the door with her boot as it slowly swung outwards increment by increment, matching the music. “If this were, like, a thready double-flute and a distant pair of pipes with a hand drum underneath beating a too-simple beat, threatening chords without actually resolving them? Oh, that would be bad. And speaking of bad, don’t foul my swings.”
“Don’t get in our way, don’t expect our help,” Honeydew said in a voice almost as absent as Nathan’s. “Don’t be directly between me and the door, don’t be directly between me and whatever we fight, and stay at least three feet from me.”
“Uh, what—”
“We’re not being dicks,” the swordswoman and wizard said in eerie unison as their breathing synchronized and their bodies went unnaturally still, yet relaxed at the same time. The point of a sword rested lightly on the ground, and a crackling static wreathed both of their hands in gauntlets of dim lightning. “We’ve done this a thousand times. Your job is just to survive.”
“Right, you’re professionals. Got it.” Nathan smiled genuinely as he hefted Saucer. It shifted in his hands, becoming some sort of spear with a vaguely leaf-bladed tip. Its six feet of haft length rested in his hands with a comfort that surprised him, and he nodded. “Is there anyth—”
A wave of magic interrupted him, washing through the three of them and the room they’d been standing in. The two undead corpses—or rather, corpses left by undead, which had been undead corpses in their own right—on the floor blinked out of existence, along with the faint glimmers of light where the third one had fallen, and everything in the room flickered as though dropping out of existence, though he knew somehow that it was an artifact of his own perception rather than an actual disappearance. It was as if he’d blinked and everything had been reset, though into a state which was somehow washed out.
“Oh,” he realized out loud, “that’s why we didn’t do any setup.”
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The moment after he said it, the door finished swinging open with a slamming lack-of-sound as the door swiveled past ninety degrees and then abruptly stopped existing. Tanya and Honeydew exploded into motion, their shared predatory languor vanishing into liquid motion, and Nathan burst into the room in their wake.
Mindful of what he’d been told, he circled immediately to clear the path between them and the door, and then he took stock of the fight that had already erupted.
Tanya’s sword was coated in blue fire that left red and orange swirling wisps in the wake of every strike. She was cleaving through shadows that rose up in an arc in front of her, reaping a dark harvest of indistinct figures fast enough that they failed at all to cohere into any recognizable form. Faster still did the shadows which weren’t in front of her die; Honeydew was wreathed in lightning, and as the two of them ran forwards a web of sparks rotated around her, growing thicker and brighter as more streamed forth from the coruscation at her fingers. The sparkweb blasted shadows apart as soon as they began to form, and the two of them charged forwards, leaving a carpet of what seemed like shards of shadow on the ground.
Charged forwards, Nathan noted silently, towards a towering skeletal beast, an amalgam of bone and metal festooned with spikes and bearing two massive tusks. Its tail narrowed rapidly to a whip-tip that he correctly assumed was bladed, and the ten feet of monster shook itself and seemed to smirk without moving at all.
Three shadows started to coalesce around him as he backed up towards the wall of what was unmistakably an arena, where twenty feet above him in the stands a five-deep ring of empty, cowled robes floated as though occupied, singing a chant composed of the names of cities and descriptions of perfidious monarchs. He struck one shadow with Saucer before it did more than start to flicker into existence, then hit the second one as it began to adopt a humanoid form, and when the third one blocked his spear with a shield and thrust for his heart with an elegant lunge he instinctively brought his haft up to block in turn.
Saucer morphed as Nathan backpedaled the single step that was left between him and the wall, and when his hand came up to parry the narrow sword in the shadow’s hand it had taken a form he didn’t recognize. Jagged and short, his own sword caught on what he was reflexively calling a rapier in the hands of his opponent. Saucer twisted in his grip and there was a soft, almost gentle-sounding snap as the rapier went from vibrantly black to dull gray in a heartbeat and then broke at the point where it was being parried.
Puzzled by that and disoriented by the speed with which the fight had gone from incipient to having broken out in earnest, Nathan almost failed to capitalize on the opportunity. He gave a lunge of his own, Saucer lengthening as he did so as the barbs and twists on the sword-catching bits which had served to defeat the opponent’s weapon disappeared in favor of a longer, wider blade.
He still almost failed to land the hit.
The no-longer-as-shadowy figure sneered at him, stepping just enough to the side to let the weapon pass by. This turned out to be a fatal error, as Nathan simply twisted his wrist in a motion that was completely impractical and would never have worked with a typical weapon, and Saucer turned in its motion to cut across halfway through the thrust. The motion had, of necessity, nothing more than his wrist muscles behind it, and he was not possessed of any particular exceptional strength; his opponent parried it with the knives Nathan hadn’t even noticed appearing on those too-slender wrists, and the knives shattered at the touch as Saucer consumed their essence.
Undeterred, unimpaired, his sword-form morphic weapon buried itself in the chest of his opponent and feasted… for all of a second and a half, at which point a new trio of shadows began to form.
“I can do this,” Nathan said with a shrinking lack of confidence, and he continued to ignore the epic battle happening in the center of the arena in favor of not dying.