As three veritable forces of nature, Calliope, Fa Lian and Ah Dan made short work of the enemies in front of them. This did not, however, mean that they were making much progress.

The room, if you could call such a massive cavern a room, seemed to go on forever. There was a chance, Dan worried to himself, that it actually would continue without end. The secrets of the labyrinth were many. Holding the underworld within it seemed well within the bounds of possibility.

All the same, they pushed on. Hyun Soon and Yurie were somewhere in this mess and needed their help.

His own mana was still mostly dry, so he focused on using the techniques he had learned from watching Xiaomei and from fighting Po Daiyu. The two energies warred, one a frantic explosion of impulse and the other a stringent and controlled expression. Together, they combined like angry siblings. When Dan lashed the purple energy of Po Daiyu’s scything energy, Xiaomei’s mana threads grabbed on, holding them back. An unexpected cohesion formed and Dan began slicing through the hordes of bones assaulting them with ease.

With a cursory pulse of his mana, an affordable expense but still too much, Dan confirmed what he suspected. Shining lines of energy connected to nearly every bone in this ghastly hellscape. The puppeteer of the Sasin Forest had been able to create a dozen threads and each one made a deadly combatant out of a small collection of viscera.

This was many magnitudes more potent. Although they tended to arrange like a human skeleton, a dog skeleton, or whatever else the bones may have come from, they weren’t actually that creature. When Calliope aimed her claws through the mid-section of a huge humanoid skeleton with a single eye socket, the creature simply came apart in the middle before rejoining and attacking again. Apart from truly shattered bones, simply scattering their enemies was not going to work.

“Calliope, throw me high!” Dan used a small portion of his mana to keep a connection between himself, Calliope and Fa Lian. Their communication unhindered by the eerie clicking and clacking of bones hitting bones which pervaded the air, they were all able to coordinate easily. Dan ran towards her without waiting and jumped. His foot found Calliope’s cupped hands and then he was soaring.

His legs were sore from the force of it but Dan could now get a proper look at the battlefield. He had to tear his eyes away from the spectacle below him and cast his mana enhanced vision around. He was looking for any pocket of combat that he could find. Fortunately, he saw what he was looking for.

Unfortunately, he saw at least three places where combat was raging. Not just that, but each small pocket of combat seemed to be heading towards the same place. An absolutely massive collection of bone, a mountain of death. The source of all the mana threads Dan had seen so far. Where they needed to be.

His flight was a long one but as all things that go up must, eventually Dan fell from the air. “Which way?” Fa Lian waited for Dan’s answer and aimed her bow. He pointed and she fired, leaving a huge corridor in the sea of bones. All three of them sprinted along it and barrelled through the wall of enemies at the far end.

“Might not be them!” Dan shouted to the other two, swinging the mana scythes wildly as he now took the vanguard. “There’s fighting everywhere and all headed for that.” Dan pointed at the gargantuan pile of bone and watched as both Calliope and Fa Lian registered it. Dan had missed it before as well, assuming that it was the far wall of the place. Instead, it was a pillar of skeletal horror which loomed over the place like a huge finger piercing the skin of a ripe melon.

As he focused on it again, Dan could have swore that he heard someone calling out for help. “Did you hear that?” Dan asked.

“It’s amazing we can hear anything over the sound of this nightmare.” Calliope winced. Dan was sympathetic. He couldn’t make his ears less powerful while making the rest of himself flow with bestial force. He imagined the same was true for Calliope. Dan put the question aside - he would just save everyone he could and hope that whoever had called was one of them.

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Their hurried flight through the army of death amassed before them was harrowing. Clutched in long-dead fingers were an assortment of rusty blades and hooks, clubs of stone or tangling ropes made of sinew. A few moments of carelessness and the horde could sweep away their feet and unleash their frenzied attacks. With Fa Lian and Calliope, Dan barely had to worry about that. Instead he focused on worrying about Hyun Soon and Yurie.

Within two minutes, the three of them had cleared the distance to the first pocket of combat Dan had spotted. With the cacophony of percussion from the bones colliding with each other and the resemblance from one pile of bones to the next, Dan had essentially stumbled right into the clearing that the combatants had made for themselves.

It was not Hyun and Yurie.

“You!” Calliope shouted the word just as Mania did the same. Before Dan even had a chance to cover the small area with his mana, the two were entangled in an earth-churning grapple. Mania had been, it seemed, just attacking the skeletons with abandon. He had no allies, though Dan himself had taken care of two potential threats in that regard. He had been laughing wildly as they landed and continued to do so as he attacked Calliope.

Which was a bad choice. Maybe Mania would have never stood a chance, maybe fighting him only through ambushes had given Dan the wrong impression but whatever the case, Calliope did not have difficulty getting the better of him. Dan heard Calliope taunt Mania as she grabbed him by the throat, batting his ineffectual arms away as she did. “I dealt with your sister already, I suppose you’re next.”

With that, she tensed her legs and the two disappeared, flying through the air to a separate, more private location. Even Dan’s impressive reflexes could hardly keep up with her leap as Calliope covered a large distance before launching Mania straight down. Dan lost sight of her as she landed heavily on the troublesome yellow majaal.

They had no time to spare worrying about Calliope. “This way.” Dan felt every fibre of himself screaming that there was no way to get everyone out of this situation. If Mania was here, his mother might be here too. He hoped with every fibre of his being that the next battle he had seen was Hyun Soon protecting Yurie. Performing a similar manoeuvre as before, Dan leapt off of a quickly formed dragonscale shield and found their next destination.

Skeletons were flying in random directions and Dan was sure he could see a flash of orange. It had to be them. The swathe that he was cutting through the horde was impressive. A little too impressive, Dan worried anxiously. “We have to hurry.” He couldn’t place the worry in his throat exactly but there were more enemies around than just the majaal.

Once more, Dan pointed and Fa Lian fired. With each shot, the bow and arrow seemed to evolve slightly. The arrowhead became thicker, the bow became longer. The force of her arrow’s flight increased each time, the explosion at the end more controlled and destructive at the same time. Dan saw as this time, she had taken a deep breath and the red scales around the front of the arrow darkened. Began to almost… wither.

The resulting blast was unlike the previous ones as when Fa Lian’s arrow landed and burst, it was not a bloody crimson flame but a stark black and red burst of energy. They were still too far away from Hyun Soon to risk hurting him or Yurie but with wide eyes, Dan asked Fa Lian to be careful with that technique. With equally wide eyes, she agreed that she would.

The monstrous bodies in the area of effect, however, were being disintegrated. Dan quickly fanned out some mana to see what was going on from where he was, still a distance away. Fa Lian’s withering mana was seeping through the bones of the skeletons it had connected with. Unlike the other attacks they had used, this damage had staying power, the bones forced to decay beyond their time.

There was something else, too.

The threads of mana which connected to the bones also withered. The actual, aggressive force that attacked them was damaged by the attack and dozens of bones clattered to the floor, no longer controlled by the main body. Somewhere in the giant tower of bone, Dan found himself hoping that it hurt.

“That worked! Your mana destroys the connection!” Dan didn’t need to say any more than that. Fa Lian got to work and Dan watched as her energy shifted. The red flames and intense heat she gave off in combat changed, darkened and warped. The discomfort of heat turned into a prickly electric feeling over Dan’s skin and the red scales that formed around Fa Lian’s eyes became pitch black.

Almost scared to get close, Dan did what he needed to so that he could also help. Fa Lian, frightening as she looked, held out a hand behind her as though passing a baton in a race. Dan slapped her hand and syphoned some of the destructive mana. He had avoided taking from the massive well that now resided within Fa Lian but recently, when Dan saw a new, stronger weapon in front of him, he was finding it hard not to grab them.

The fury of a black dragon ripped through Guan Ah Dan. If Xiaomei and Po Daiyu’s mana had felt like an argument inside his channels, this felt like a war. Dan snarled as the acidic mana worked its way through him, spreading through him with all the intensity of a wildfire in the depths of summer. Brutal, searing but nourishing in a way that Dan didn’t have words for.

“No more delays.” Fa Lian’s voice was harsh and loud, carrying over the sounds of combat without need for Dan’s amplification. “We punch through and stop for nothing. We get Hyun Soon and Yurie out and then regroup. We will also find Shade if we can.”

Dan smiled. Fa Lian had been raised to be a leader her whole life and while she may have avoided the responsibility for as long as possible, it wasn’t like she could be a different person. Without a second of doubt or argument, Dan fell into line and did as he was told.

Then, the two dragons flew.