“What do we do?” Amara asked very quietly, eyes never leaving the horror of Charigris.

For all that the elemental lacked flesh, they were the very definition of a nightmare made flesh. Elementals grew with power, and the monster before them, while a little bit smaller than Qrilotesh, had certainly been on the way to parity. And it was easy to see how, hundreds of pleading eyes, some of flame, some of ice, a few of stone and a smattering of other elements, focused on the mages. A hundred voices spoke in an incoherent cacophony of pleas.

“I think we found what happened to all those missing elementals.” Erebus said slowly, licking suddenly dry lips.

“They’re still conscious in there…” Lana added, even the jaded demoness managed to sound horrified.

“But what do we do?!” The vampire hissed, trying to both yell and whisper at once.

The necromancer didn’t respond, not yet, his gaze roving up Charigris’ form, whether looking for a weakness or simply too stunned by the sight, only he knew.

Chargris’ body was humanoid, a sharp diversion of the records which had described it as a shapeless blob as was typical of wildfire elementals. It turned out sometimes you really were what you ate. All those mages-turned-elemental had moulded his body as much as empowered him.

But the crown atop Charigris’ head? That was all him.

With the voice of a blast furnace, the King of the Ashes spoke a single word. The only word he had ever spoken in his long life.

“BURN!”

They should have died in that moment, blasted apart by just the wave of air the words provoked, let alone the heat that followed.

Erebus had apparently been waiting for it, because the necromancer stepped forwards, planting his staff on the ground as he cast one of the two great bound spells he’d put upon it. “Absolute aegis.”

The words were calm, measured and utterly implacable. They had to be for the spell to work.

The silver ring on the staff evaporated as a shield sprung up around the four mages. A blue hexagrammatic dome, each of the hexagrams absolutely festooned with runes of protection, endurance, regeneration, temperature control, dimensional lockdown, radiation abatement and a dozen other threats as Erebus put all the mana he could into the casting for good measure.

The shockwave hit them, washing over the shield as a wave breaking upon a harbour, and to about as little effect.

“I thought we were in trouble for a second there.” Natalya admitted, letting out a breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding.

Erebus didn’t respond. Still staring silently at Charigris.

The elemental stared back, a smug and satisfied smile on its face as it reached for the dome. Fingers the size of a wagon closed around Erebus’ aegis. His perfected shield. And squeezed.

For a few moments it looked like the dome of cerulean power would hold, but cracks began to spread slowly across it.

The necromancer didn’t even flinch as runes were splintered into uselessness. Because as they splintered they pulled free of the shield, hovering inside it as the runes of regeneration kicked in. The cracks slowly healed and the shattered runes returned to the shield, even more of them now as each broken part became a new whole glyph.

There was a howl of pain and Charigris let get of the dome as it glowed ever brighter as the elemental stared at his faded fingers where his energy had been drained.

Erebus permitted himself a smirk, still watching in silent judgement as the next best thing to a god failed to put so much as a smudge on his best shield.

“It’s entirely self-sustaining.” Natalya observed with a whistle, just finished reading the runes. “The only way Charigris is getting through to us is if he can make the entire shield fail at once. How long have you been working on this?”

“Three decades, on and off.” The necromancer finally spoke. “It can be broken. Charigris will figure it out soon I fear.”

The elemental was certainly trying a new tactic, unleashing a bellow’s breath assault, the infamous assault of a forge elemental. The forge elemental in question was screaming in agony as a focused beam of fire burst from Charigris’ mouth. If the aegis hadn’t had muffling charms they’d have been rendered deaf just by the roar of the flames.

It was a far more focused attack than simply trying to squeeze and sear, though from a monster of Charigris’ size it still covered an entire side of the dome.

The blow caved the aegis in slightly, then more as the beam kept trying to cut through it. Again the aegis, unbidden by its master, reacted. Runes of siphoning moving to meet the attack, and though they glowed a brilliant blue almost as bright as the beam, they held, using the magical fire to empower the shield against the very flame itself.

Inch by agonizing inch the aegis returned to its perfect dome shape.

“Now he’s going to start getting clever.” Erebus concluded.

“You seem remarkably calm about this.” Natalya noted, “You’ve got another play.”

“Not me. All I’m doing is buying time.” The archmage smiled, terribly smug as he watched his foe.

Charigris’ next attack was to clap his hands, the dome between them. It was a little more involved than that, the absorbed elementals had been moved to his hands, ice in one, fire in the other, as he forced the shield to react to two different magical strikes at once.

He might as well not have bothered, the aegis cracked a bit from the initial impact but the siphoning runes and elemental specific defences moved through the dome to sap and reinforce.

The second greatest elemental on Reath screamed his rage, totally unprepared for being denied. He was destruction incarnate and the very idea that anything could hold against his wrath offended him.

One of the siphoning runes burst as the sudden surge in strength proved too much for it. It didn’t reform, the damage simply too catastrophic.

“And that’s game.” Erebus sighed, “Still let’s not make it easy for him. ‘Mar, if you would be so kind as to try and incinerate my shield I would be obliged.”

“Um… sure?” The vampire just doing as she was told. Sure the command made absolutely no sense but this fight was far beyond her capabilities.

Her flames struck the shield and were absorbed by it, not stopping or even siphoning the energy but spreading it even over the shield as Charigris recoiled as if stung.

“If we survive this you’re teaching me that.” Natalya told Erebus sharply, trying to spot what in the runework filigree was treating Amara’s fire as an empowerment rather than a threat.

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“I will.” Their leader agreed as Charigris slowly smiled, moving to grasp the dome in both hands once more.

The monster put all his immense strength behind it, the aegis a ball of delicate glass beneath a hydraulic press.

The aegis still held, but this time the spiderwebbing cracks weren’t being pushed back, slowly advancing as the siphoning runes burst one by one, overloaded with more mana than they could ever hope to drain.

Charigris didn’t get it all his own way, Erebus fired a burst of entropy, backed by annihilation, into his shield, which drank the inimical energy greedily. The elemental screamed in pain but didn’t let go this time. For all that it was as grievous a blow as he’d ever known it was still little more than a bee sting and he’d been prepared to get stung this time.

“BURN.” He declared, or perhaps ordered, then took in a deep breath. This time multiple forge elementals wailed as the bellow’s breath screamed through the air at them.

For the final time the shield held. Its surface was nothing but spiderwebbing cracks, the runes all broken beyond repair. Erebus sunk to his knees as the aegis defaulted to its final defence, its creator’s will.

Held together by just willpower, the shield shook and Erebus shook with it, fighting with everything he had. Every scrap of defiance, every ounce of tenacity and every drop of spite as he very slowly, knees trembling, rose to his feet to glare at Charigris.

“Let me guess.” The necromancer snarled as the elemental took another massive breath in. “Burn?”

Charigris let out the breath. Not in an apocalyptic beam of fire and hate but in shocked pain as a monster larger than Seruatis’ great monolith hit him in the stomach in a flying leap.

Alice was even harder to look at than Charigris. The warshifter barely came up to the elemental’s thigh, and it was already the largest warshift she’d ever done, and was still growing.

Her bodyplan could never exist on any product of evolution. Thick bone plates covered every inch of her except her eyes which were protected by about a dozen nictating eyelids, each made of the closest thing biology could make to quartz.

She had a dozen insectoid legs, the sharp points digging deep into the rock, resembling nothing so much as the product of an insane coupling between an elephant and an antlion. Her tusks were immense, Alice barely even able to keep her head up from their weight despite her neck being thicker than any oak that had ever rested beneath Reath’s sun.

Her two front legs were reptilian, adamantine scales cover everything except the viciously serrated claws, each larger than a greatsword, at the end of them.

And riding her back was Weaver, the arachni had webbed herself in place on Alice’s back, her normally bright carapace completely black where she’d coated herself in shadows to fend off the heat, and over her abdomen was Sato’s bandoleer.

Charigris stared in disbelief at the insects that had dared attack it, the elemental genuinely befuddled. Mortals were not meant to attack it, they were meant to flee or die.

Alice rose up on her hind legs, baleful eyes glaring at him. She’d borrowed them from the gorgons, it had been a long shot but Alice was a firm believer that you missed every shot you didn’t take.

Sadly the elemental did not turn to stone, the warshifter instantly swapping them for something with a little more visual acuity as she growled, “Yeah that’s right ugly, not used to fighting someone your own size are you?”

It was a bit laughable, and Charagris certainly did, Alice even stood to her full height just about reached his waist… for now.

He stopped laughing as the warshifter raked her claws across his thigh, ripping out thick gobbets of not-flesh even as Weaver began to throw Sato’s arsenal at him in a veritable bombardment, the spider’s thread wrapping around the bottles, flicking them around her head a couple times to build up speed before launching them.

Most of the bottles did nothing, their effects too small for Charigris to even notice them, and those that did, did little more than sting.

Alice’s frenzied assault on the other hand certainly got his attention, the elemental didn’t bother to use fire. He just drew back his foot and kicked.

Over a hundred tonnes of warshifter was sent flying across the landscape, Weaver shadowwalking away before she could land. It was a good thing too as Alice left a series of furrows where she bounced and rolled to a stop, claws and legs digging into the ground to do so.

“We needed to buy more time.” Erebus sighed as Weaver appeared next to him.

“That was a terrible plan.” The arachni said cheerily, already getting to work on her next attack, beginning to weave an incredibly thick and long rope of darkness, apparently intent on repeating the restraints that had worked so well on the Speaker.

“Everyone, I need you to run.” Erebus declared, going so far as to dispel Weaver’s work. “Get the Hells out of here… Now!”

“Can’t we-?” Amara began.

“I said now! Go. Flee. Amara grab Alec and Holly. Get them out of here! We cannot win this!” The necromancer bellowed as Charigris advanced on Alice, the warshifter backing away from him.

This time they listened.

They wouldn’t get away of course, mere mortal legs could never hope to match Charigris’ titanic strides. Which was why Erebus stayed behind, Lana at his side.

Natalya looked back once, crestfallen as she realized that her friend was resolved to die for them. For a moment she considered staying as well, but she’d faced facts in the Underreath, some fights she simply wasn’t strong enough to even assist with. There wasn’t a single spell she could do without pouring her life and soul into it that Charigris would even notice, let alone hurt him.

Staying would just cheapen Erebus’ sacrifice, so she ran, and did not look back again.

“You should go too.” The archmage of entropy told Lana quietly. “Unless your armour of sin can protect you?”

“If I had a helmet it would.” Lana said with a shrug, “But for all it cannot harm me with flame, my head is quite crushable.”

“I wouldn’t normally criticise the Lady but I fear in this she made a mistake, was there not time enough for a helm?” The necromancer said conversationally, wincing as Charigris grabbed Alice and simply pulled one of her clawed arms off at the shoulder, the warshifter admittedly using it to pull free in the process to open a quickly healed gash on his arm.

“She wanted you to have a way to kill me if I proved disloyal.” The demoness replied merrily.

“Then go. I don’t win this one Lana, there’s no point you dying with me.” He informed her.

“No. You could have killed that thing.” She tapped the orb of annihilation on his staff, “Yet you haven’t. You think there’s something you can do.”

“The one thing she’d never forgive me for. Trusting others.” Erebus smiled, “She said I’d need three aces. I can kill Charigris with just one. That means we win this battle. Besides someone needs to bear witness.”

*

The fight was not going well for Alice. Charigris’ body was so hot that any engagement scorched her, burning through the thick bone plates she was insulating herself with. She’d stopped putting pain receptors on anything that wasn’t immediately vital.

She was less bulky than she’d started the fight, the elemental’s growing habit of ripping off limbs had forced her to slim down, going quadrupedal as she bounced in and out, slicing with her claws then withdrawing. Her claws had changed too, it turned out elementals did not in fact bleed and so she’d ditched the serrations, the claws getting long and sharper. The extra range was vital to staying ahead of the titanic monster’s rather clumsy movements and they melted every time she slashed him.

Her only saving grace was that Charigris was a terrible fighter, just genuinely awful. It wasn’t surprising. Before today nothing had ever survived a single blow from it. The problem was the elemental was learning and learning fast.

It no longer kicked her away, or threw her, recognising its superior size would let it just tear parts of her off if it could grab her. Fortunately it hadn’t realized it could just crush her instead.

“BURN!”

“We get it, you like burning things.” Alice grumbled, leaping away from another clumsy lunge, a newly formed tail flicked bone spikes the size of lampposts into his face.

Charigris more or less ignored it, Alice ditching the tail immediately as she sought out some combination of limbs that might give her some sort of advantage.

The problem was she couldn’t bulk up and keep her current speed, and if she slowed down then Charigris would kill her. It really was that simple. But she couldn’t match him blow for blow until she matched him tonne for tonne.

For now she slid between his legs, cutting what would have been the hamstrings on a human. It did nothing. Elementals were essentially homogenous, it didn’t matter where she hit, all it did was cost him a little bit of mana.

Out of desperation she tried venom. There were very few creatures that could damage magic with their bite, but one of them was the basilisk. A few modifications to let her spit it instead of inject with a bite and she hit Charigris with a high power hose of magic necrotizing basilisk venom as he turned to face her.

For the first time Charigris’ scream was one of genuine agony as he received his first true wound of the fight, fiery not-flesh melting under the spray. It wasn’t a massive wound, just a very thin line of bubbling, oozing black across his chest. But this time the wound stayed.

Alice backed up, keeping the spray up and if anything intensifying it, having to sacrifice biomass to do so. But she wasn’t able to back up fast enough to escape Charigris’ charge, the sudden, urgent rage giving the elemental enough speed to close the gap and grab her by the throat, squeezing the sizzling flesh with all of his strength.

It didn’t stop the caustic spray of venom. The glands were in her mouth, not her throat. Still this presented a real problem, the warshifter adding more and larger glands until the inside of her mouth was little more than a toothless and tongueless venom factory and delivery system. Some of the venom spilled, burning her, but most of it hit Charigris. It wasn’t going to be enough.

With a victorious roar of “BURN!” he took her head between his hands and squeezed until there was a grisly pop, letting Alice’s body fall limply to the floor.