Nick cursed under his breath as he raised his sword in front of him, steeling himself for one of the toughest battles of his life. While he refused to simply lay down and die, he couldn’t deny that this was a black, borderline hopeless situation.
Nick and Sophia were battered and exhausted, and their enemies were fresh. Even still, he thought that they could overcome the four beasts skittering across the sand with the help of her wasps. The quartet of killer insects wasn’t the reason why dread was pooling in his guts like molten lead.
The real problem was that the matriarch was sure to return before long, turning a grim situation into a recipe for certain death.
But Nick had neither the time nor the temperament to give into despair. Instead, he used the handful of heartbeats until the battle resumed to inventory their resources and evaluate their options.
Sophia still had a pair of frost venom wasps in the air, but they had already been out for a while, and she didn’t have enough mana to summon more. Worse, one of the summons was missing a part of its wing, limiting its mobility. He suspected that they wouldn’t last much longer before fading away regardless.
Evaluating the renders’ rate of advance, Nick judged that there was less than a minute left until their ordeal entered a deadly new phase. He had to use the final seconds at his disposal to come up with a plan. A strategy that would give them a chance of living long enough to see the sun again.
They couldn’t run and had no hope of defeating the matriarch in their current condition. Finishing off the juveniles before she returned would require everything that they had.
Their only chance was to kill the youngsters before their mother rose from the pit, or they would be overwhelmed within a matter of heartbeats. Nick was low on mana and exhausted from all the running and jumping. While he still had his flask, if he drank it now, they wouldn’t have anything that could save them if they took a critical wound.
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Come on Nick. Breathe. Think. Shut out the stress, the panic, the pain. Always stay cool, calm, and collected. Despite straining his brain to the limit while calling upon artic clarity to enhance his focus, no grand revelation came to him, and they were almost out of time.
None of his plans covered a situation like this, and he couldn’t come up with anything that might work in the handful of heartbeats they had left.
Thankfully, while Nick had no cards left to play that might save their lives, it turned out that Sophia still had a final ace up her sleeve. She let out a long sigh, seeming to have come to a decision, then turned to face him.
“Nick. I need you to hold them off for another five minutes and pray that the big one doesn’t come back just yet. I have one last ability I can use. I’ll be completely helpless while it’s charging and as weak as a kitten after, so I need to use it while I’m hiding in that machine. My summons are almost out of juice. I can send them on a suicide run to disrupt the renders’ charge and take out one of the juveniles, but you’ll have to hold off the other three until I finish. I’m sorry that I couldn’t do more.”
“Go. Do it now.” Nick didn’t hesitate. Didn’t delay her by asking useless questions about her mysterious ability. All of that could wait until later. No matter what his partner was planning, it could only improve their odds at this point, even if his chances of holding off three twelve-foot centipedes for that long were poor at best.
With a grateful nod at his show of trust, Sophia touched the strange black gem embedded between her breasts and disappeared into the guts of the mazelike machine behind her, leaving him to guard the entrance.
During the course of their brief exchange, both of her wasps had vanished, although he could hear their wings buzzing faintly. Ten seconds later, Nick learned that they had flown all the way up to the roof of the cavern.
He caught sight of them again when both summons tucked in their wings and dropped straight down, streaking for one of the centipedes in a kamikaze dive. The one that had seen some action already and wasn’t quite as alert as the others.
The moment he saw what they were up to, Nick started yelling, running forward with his sword raised over his head, as if he intended to meet the centipedes’ charge head on.
As he’d hoped, they turned to look at him with a pitiless glint in their compound eyes. His antics were enough to focus their attention on his position, keeping them from noticing the attack coming from above.