Alarion stepped forward, sword at the ready and glanced back at Sierra. “Get behind m-”

“Oh do not right now.” The girl scowled. Silver steel flashed in her right hand, but she did not hold it as a weapon. Instead she began to work through strange patterns that Alarion could only assume were component to her magic. Though similar to ones he'd seen in the past, hers were more elegant than the precise motions of ZEKE, or Elena's symmetrical signs. They felt fluid, with rises and falls. Almost instrumental.

No. Not almost. It was quiet, hard to hear over the sound of marble tiles shattering under the impact of yet more fiends, but Sierra was humming in time with her motions. It was a quiet music that built in intensity as the fiends began to move toward them.

“Play on.” Sierra chanted with a musical lilt to her voice as she raised both hands to an unheard crescendo. “Spectral Orchestra.”

Then she threw her hands down and the world went white.

Alarion had experienced nothing like it. A noise so loud that it violated his other senses. That left him kneeling on the floor as the initial shockwave dissipated, unsure of how he got there. Even Sierra had been taken aback, her gloved hand on her ear, a pained expression on her face.

The fiends had taken the worst of it.

The monsters closest to the epicenter of her spell had been rendered mostly liquid by the pressure of the noise, their cores shattered. Those at a further distance had lost large portions of their bodies that had been facing the attack. Some were missing arms and legs, others had chests or backs made newly concave by the impact. At least half a dozen fiends had died in that single attack, while twice as many had been grievously injured.

But that part wasn’t even the focus of the spell. Sierra had told Alarion that her magical focus was as a summoner. And [Spectral Orchestra] was a summoning spell, first and foremost.

The spell had left behind a small white portal whose edges pulsed with rippling vibrations. It wasn’t until his hearing began to return that Alarion realized that the noise had never stopped, it had only diminished. A terrible racket of a different source spilled out from that portal, a cacophony of poorly tuned brass instruments, off beat drumming and shrieking strings. And that noise was growing louder and louder, building to a second crescendo as something emerged.

At first Alarion thought it was a trick of the light, or some lingering damage from Sierra’s spell. The space was empty, but the air was vibrating. Those vibrations took on an indistinct shape, a pulse in the air that looked roughly bipedal as it stalked toward the newest fiend.

The injured monster turned on this new threat and swiped one claw toward its shuddering mass, only to be rocked by a blurred counter attack accompanied by the sharp sting of a string instrument. It tried once more and was struck again, this time knocked entirely off its feet by the embodiment of sound.

Another shape emerged from the portal, then another. Then another.

Alarion looked to Sierra.

“A little more warning next time?” He asked, slowly getting back to his feet as more of the sound-forms funneled out of the portal, until twelve in total were available to abuse the already wounded fiends.

“It is not supposed to do that.” Sierra said by way of apology, a hand still held to the side of her head. “Some damage, yes, but nothing so extreme that it would hurt us, let alone kill multiple fiends at once. Something about the acoustics of this place. The spell normally only summons four of them.”

Alarion considered that, then asked the obvious. “Can you do it again?”

Sierra shook her head, the motion clearly causing her pain. “Normally yes. But the amplification more than quadrupled the mana cost. I’m spent.”

That was a problem. Her spell had been terribly effective, but a glance at the hole above them showed that it had not been an efficient use of their resources. Fiends clambered down the walls of the pit in ones and twos, then fell amidst Sierra’s summons to join the ongoing melee.

“You are on clearing duty.” Sierra instructed. When Alarion sought to protest, she spit him with an ice blue stare. “Once you run out of cores to break, then you can help me fight.”

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She didn’t wait for his reply.

The two had sparred often enough for Alarion to know he was no match for her in direct combat. Even so, he had not realized how stark the difference was until Sierra met the first of the fiends in battle. She was fast, her movements precise and well honed through endless repetition. She did not dodge a yard when a foot would do, weaving in between fiendish claws to rake their bodies with cut after cut of her own long knife.

She’d dropped two fiends before Alarion had even reached the fray. This left him two obvious targets as he shifted his sword to its proper size and brought it down hard on his first victim.

You have slain [Starving Lesser Fiend – UCL 21]– Bonus Experience earned for slaying an opponent above your UCL. Reduced Experience earned for slaying a suppressed opponent. This experience has been split between active combatants.

Alarion did not have time to consider what suppression was in this context. Instead he swung. And swung. And swung again. Each hit cracked a fiendish heart, and each death brought a similar notification.

And something else.

He’d not noticed it in the aftermath of Sierra’s overpowered magic, but each death sent a pulse of white-blue light throughout the chamber. It was so faint at first that he thought he’d imagined it, but it grew in intensity and staying power with each fiend he killed. Before long the glow was consistent, outlining a series of mysterious lines in sharp angles and small circles upon the white marble walls.

“Sierra.” Alarion said between kills. The two had set a steady rhythm, backing one another up. She would strike down a fiend, then cover him when killed it. Then he would take the offense, brutalizing the nearest fiends to keep them at bay while Sierra isolated a new target with the help of her spectral minions. “Do you-”

“I see it.” She confirmed as her knife dug deep into the body of her most recent target. “I do not know what it is.”

“Should we be worried?”

“What part of-” Sierra’s words caught in her throat as her dagger clipped bone in a fiend’s torso and stuck in place. Sensing her weakness, the fiend pounced, only to be met with three brisk incapacitating thrusts to the side of its head, courtesy of a punching dagger quick drawn from her hip. “What part of 'I do not know' makes you think I should know?”

In truth they had greater things to worry about. Sierra’s spell-casting and their subsequent rush had done much to thin the fiend’s initial numbers, but had done nothing to stem the flow. The fiends fell in small clusters, and while all were hurt by the fall, few suffered debilitating injuries. For every three that the small party killed, one snuck through long enough to retaliate. A claw to Sierra’s arm, a vicious bite on Alarion’s shoulder. The summons took the worst of it, with nearly half their number dispersed in the first few minutes of combat.

They’d lose this fight. Attrition would chip away at them, slow and steady until something broke. They’d run out of minions to take damage for them or perhaps Alarion would be forced to compound his malus with yet another potion. Their stamina reserves were flagging and there was no end in sight.

It was a matter of when, not if.

“I’m sorry.” Alarion said, one hand on the flat of his blade as he bull rushed into the wall of fiends and sent them tumbling back. He flourished his blade once and chopped a fiend’s leg off on the backswing before he carried through the momentum into the decapitation of two others.

It wasn’t enough. Not nearly enough. Two more fell behind him, eager to join the fight. Another grabbed his leg, digging talons into his calf and tearing the muscle as Alarion screamed in pain. He dropped to a knee and slammed the edge of his blade through the fiend’s core as another loomed over him. Its threat was short lived as Sierra arrived and opened its throat with a flick of her wrist, then sent another sprawling with an arcing kick.

“Save your sorry.” Sierra replied as she met his gaze.

“Be better.” The two said in unison.

With her help, Alarion stood on his wounded leg. No longer able to properly wield his greatsword, he shrunk it down and mirrored Sierra’s grip as she waded into the fiends once again. He stayed one step behind her, striking at limbs as they sought to injure her and stabbing repeatedly at the cores of downed fiends once she felled them. The remaining sonic shades fell in behind Alarion, covering his rear in turn as the pair redoubled their efforts against what felt like an unending tide.

Until, at last, it ended.

Neither of them noticed at first. Both were so caught up in their task that they failed to recognize that the telltale thump of fiends joining the battle had ended. It was only as the remaining number began to thin that either spared a glance to see what had changed.

Above them the fiends had indeed stopped falling. More than that, the few that had already entered the pit were skittering back up the way they’d came.

It was then that Alarion saw him.

At such considerable distance Alarion first mistook him for a man. He was tall, broad and in the prime of his youth. Wide rimmed circular glasses were perched on an aquiline nose as the man, the thing looked down at him, and took notes in a large ledger. Its skin was ashen, a dead thing from which life had long since drained. To see it in motion, as though it were alive, struck Alarion with such a primal wave of revulsion that he nearly vomited on the spot.

It saw him and gave a thin smile. Not demeaning, not malicious. The sort of smile one gave a complete stranger when passing them on the street. As if to say, ‘don’t worry about me’.

“Strike! Kotone!” Sierra incanted beside him.

Her familiar appeared in an instant, its small body rocketing up toward the surface. A stinger had emerged from its lower body, aimed at only one target.

The revenant waved its hand dismissively and a fiend leapt from the wall of the pit, intercepting the rushing familiar in mid-air and tearing it apart in two quick pulls. In the same instant, Alarion’s stomach sank. Not because of the failed attack or the death of Sierra’s familiar, but because the ground beneath them had shifted.

The room was descending.