Someone shouted her name. Her vision spun. What was happening?

Kill that thing, Salos hissed from her chest, feral and forceful. Devour it whole.

Cass blinked, her vision clearing to see Alyx and Marco in battle against a giant spider-man.

Storehouse Crystal Keeper

[The care and propagation of magic crystals is a lost art, known now to few outside this storehouse.

As a construct left in charge of maintaining the Crystal Caverns of the Averenis Storehouse, it is an avatar used to address irregularities and issues.]

Cass blinked again. That wasn’t what it had said last time, was it?

Slay it! Salos insisted again.

“One second, Salos,” Cass muttered, her head still ringing.

It was happening again. This was exactly what had happened when they’d encountered the Caretaker in the Deep. Which meant…

Cass winced, the pain in her shoulder announcing herself as she shifted her weight.

Hell. She’d been impaled!

She’d figure out the rest in a minute. The first thing she needed to do was get herself unstuck from the wall.

She grabbed the crystal projectile with both hands. The left, the side with the crystal, was weak. Both hands bled as the crystal’s sharp edges cut into them.

Cass pulled. With all her Strength, she pulled. The crystal didn’t budge. There was only pain from the attempt. Cass screamed.

Kill it! Salos howled with her.

“Not helpful, Salos!” Cass growled.

Brute strength wouldn’t work. Then what?

The crystal was stone, wasn’t it? Or a kind of stone, probably? It was as much earth as stone was, right? So then, she should be able to manipulate it with her skill.

She wrapped her hand around it again and pressed Elemental Manipulation through the crystal. The skill grabbed it, but no amount of pulling or pushing would change the arrangement of the crystal’s form. It refused her at every turn.

Cass pulled again, blood dripping down her hands.

Kill it!

“Salos, I am trying my very best, but unless you have any ideas on how to get me out of this, your yelling is not helpful.”

He fell silent a moment before saying, Destroy it.

“Thank you, again, already the plan. More details would help.”

How could she destroy it? What did she have that she could use? A skill? She ran through her skills mentally:

Atmospheric Sense? No.

Wind Step? Not while pinned, and really, that was the problem.

Staff Mastery? No.

Stealth? Far too late for that.

Dodge? Can’t dodge what’s already impaled in her shoulder. Perhaps she might have avoided it if she’d been in her right mind initially, but again, too late for that now.

Stormstride Sprint? No.

Elemental Manipulation? Probably technically possible, but she couldn’t figure out how directly right now.

Wind Blade? No.

Mana Blade? Probably not? Could she cut the crystal with a Mana Bladed knife and then pull herself off the portion stuck to the wall? That was what she was looking to do, wasn’t it? Ugh, gruesome. She put Mana Blade in the ‘maybe’ category.

Soul Guard? No.

Identify?

Crystal Shard

[A glowing crystal sharp enough to slice flesh and hard enough to pierce stone.]

Helpful.

Foraging? No.

Mana Sense? It glowed to her Mana Sense even brighter than to her ordinary eyes. The color wasn’t quite uniform, there were striations and places where the light concentrated. Where the dimmer places weak points in the crystal’s structure? Maybe.

Beacon of Hearth and Home? No.

Poison Resistance? No.

Herbal Concocting? Definitely not.

Trap Detection? Once again, far too late for that.

Jothi Language Comprehension? Not unless magic crystal shards could be convinced to move verbally.

Cass scowled. That was not a promising brainstorming session. The only feasible plan was to jam a blade into a presumably weaker section of crystal and hope it shattered, or at least broke enough that she could pry her body off the remains of the shard.

There were several issues with the plan. The most notable being it would transform her problem from being pinned to the wall to bleeding out in the middle of the room. But one thing at a time, right?

Cass pulled her dagger from her Bag and coated it in Mana Blade. She inspected the shard again with Mana Sense and picked out a spot near her body with little magic glowing.

Reading on Amazon or a pirate site? This novel is from Royal Road. Support the author by reading it there.

Here went nothing.

She drove her dagger into the crystal.

A piece flaked off and her knife skidded into her shoulder. The whole crystal jolted, its sharp edges cutting into her flesh.

Cass screamed again.

Damn. She probably should have realized that would happen. Was it at least loose now?

She slipped the dagger back into her Bag and pulled on the crystal again. It wriggled up and down, every twist shooting fresh pain into her shoulder, but it remained fixed in the wall behind her.

This wasn’t working. What else did she have? Was there some creative use of Elemental Manipulation she could use? The crystal refused her manipulations entirely, but maybe there was something else she could manipulate?

The wall behind her, maybe? If she couldn’t manipulate the crystal out of the wall, could she manipulate the wall off the crystal? It was worth a try.

She pushed on Elemental Manipulation. It didn’t really want to grab at the material behind her. Why not? She’d gotten it to pull on stone under her feet or at the end of her staff before. Why was behind her back different?

Was it that her feet were not too dissimilar to her hands? Maybe. But then what about her staff? It was a focus, like Pellen’s books or the storm crystal she’d gotten.

Could she use the crystal sticking through her as a focus? She pushed the skill through the crystal. It resisted her, draining her Focus into the crystal’s lattice. But she could follow it back into the ordinary stone of the wall.

Now came the next challenge. She’d never pushed stone into itself. And, with some experimentation, she found she couldn’t. Stone refused to compress. Hardly surprising if she was being honest. Pushing a solid thing into another solid thing was unlikely to go well.

Instead, she needed to pull the edges of the puncture out and away from the crystal, slowly increasing the size of the hole it had made behind her and increasing the thickness of the wall around the hole instead.

Some 80-odd Focus later, Cass crumpled to the ground, her crystal pin freed.

Pain rolled through her. Hot and feverish and mixing with Salos’s cries for blood. The shard was still in her shoulder, but that might be for the best, as painful as it was every time she moved. If she removed it, who knew how much blood she’d pour out? And bleeding was the fastest way to drop Health.

Cass pushed herself back to her feet.

Alyx and Marco were admirably holding off the Crystal Keeper. Pellen stood back, throwing barriers between them and the still-flying shards. However, they were all covered in abrasions. A long cut ran across Alyx’s forehead, bleeding down the side of her head. Several crystal shards protruded from Marco’s armor.

“We’ve really done it this time,” Cass muttered.

Kill it! Salos hissed. Her stomach growled with him.

“I’m getting to it,” Cass said. But charging in blind would do nothing. Its limbs were all stone hard, its head invulnerable to damage. Its joints bled, but no amount of pounding on them so far had broken a limb to the point it failed to support the creature’s its weight.

Alyx had left many cuts on its body, Reverberating Blade propagating them further. Pellen was tied up blocking as many of the flying crystals in the air from striking the others or Cass. And they were still targeting Cass, even now.

But nothing was over yet.

Cass activated Stealth, her presence dropping like a stone in her new hood. With the others to throw crystals at, it didn’t seem to notice that Cass had disappeared.

Cass stalked around it. Every step was agony, the crystal in her shoulder jostling with even the smallest movements.

Make it pay for hurting you, Salos hissed. Devour it. Grow stronger.

She would. She had every intention of doing so.

As she stalked around it, she watched the creature. Atmospheric Sense didn’t detect breathing. It was no natural being. That meant, like the wolves, bleeding it dry was unlikely to be effective.

But then perhaps it had a vulnerable core they could exploit.

Mana Sense showed a set of three glimmering points in its body: the head, the humanoid chest, and the center of the thorax. Attacks against the head had been ineffective up to now, which left two new targets.

Cass snuck underneath the creature. She Dodged a crystal flying past her. It was undirected, just part of the surrounding maelstrom, but it was also unblocked by Pellen.

Underneath the Keeper, she summoned a Mana Wind Blade to her Staff and thrust it into its thorax.

The Keeper screamed as the blade pierced its grey skin. Ichor splashed over Cass. The scream raked at Cass’s body. It echoed around her soul.

Salos screamed with it. Primal. Pain.

The crystal in her shoulder resonated with the sound. Her shoulder burned.

Her body shook. Her arms trembled. Her knees gave out. Her hands slipped.

The pain was too much. She crumbled to the floor, every cell in her body vibrating in painful time with that thing’s demented scream.

She needed to make it stop. Needed to be stronger.

Alyx winced at the sound, her body faltering mid-strike. A shard of crystal spun into her side, lodging itself in her armor. Marco hoisted his shield, a glow emanating from its silver surface. He stood firm. Pellen was behind him, shaking but still chanting.

One of the Keeper’s hands grabbed the stunned Alyx. At its touch, she pulled away, but it held fast, dragging it into its space instead. She hacked at it with her sword, but it deflected off its skin.

A crystal sword materialized in its other hand. It raised it slowly, methodically, the sea of flying crystals still swirling around them.

And still, it screamed. It echoed in her head, pushing out every other thought. Pushing out everything except the pain.

The pain and the certainty that Alyx was about to die.

Something swelled at that thought. The image of a girl flashed before her eyes. She stood in a spring, her white dress fluttering around her knees over crystal water, her hands clasped together in prayer, her crimson hair rolling down her shoulders, her face upturned in the sunlight streaming down through the trees.

It wasn’t Alyx held by the Keeper anymore. It was that girl.

It wasn’t Cass collapsed in pain on the ground anymore in the Shadow’s Cowl.

The wearer of the cowl pushed themselves to their feet. Pain racked every inch of their body. But what was the point of a body if that girl was to die?

They could not allow that.

They activate Stealth, disappearing as the shadows swallowed them whole. Even the memory of their presence was temporarily suppressed.

They sped between the flying crystals. Dodging and weaving. Making space between them with Elemental Manipulation where there was no room. The slyphid Cass might have struggled to move them with that skill, but stone and mineral and all that lay in the deep dark places of the world was their domain. They moved it as easily as Cass moved air. As the Keeper before them moved them.

They drew their dagger from Cass’s Bag. It was comfortable in their hand. It was sharp. It sliced through the elbow of the Keeper with practiced ease, Hidden Blade multiplying the damage it might have done many times over.

The girl fell backward, off balance, as the arm holding her detached from the Keeper’s body. She disappeared from the perception of everyone as the wearer of the Cowl caught her.

“Alyx!” Marco shouted in concern as the girl disappeared.

His worry was short-lived. They reappeared behind him a moment later.

The girl looked up at the wearer of the Cowl, her eyes wide and confused. They set her down, dropping to a kneel in front of her. Their soul soared to venerate their mistress again. The only thing greater than having saved her would be to have not needed to at all.

But then, she was not out of danger, was she? Their hand clenched around their dagger—their precious gift from her—and stood to face the beast again.

It rushed Marco, its spindly legs tapping over the stone floors with a grotesque clack clack clack, screaming and trailing a stream of ichor all the way. It had not for a moment stopped.

The wearer of the Cowl Stealthed again, slipping around behind the creature. They leapt, Cass’s Strength more than enough to push them into the air above the beast’s body. With Cass’s considerable Dexterity, they landed easily on its galloping back, riding the rise and fall with ease.

Their dagger, sheathed in Mana Blade, dug into its thorax and buried up to the hilt before the Keeper knew they were there.

It didn’t stop its charge, though it shook its whole body, attempting to throw them from its back. Again, Cass’s Dexterity was more than enough to keep them right where they wanted to be. They pulled their dagger free with a fountain of ichor and drove it down again. Again. Again.

Every stab cut deeper. Every stab brought the blade closer to that mana core Cass had spotted earlier.

They would slay this beast and protect their mistress. Nothing would stop them.

Not this beast. Not the family. Not the gods.

Pain rippled through them. It burned with a fury that erupted from deep in their soul. It blazed into the dagger, ripping flesh from the Keeper’s thorax.

They screamed with the Keeper, their rage unspeakable, drowning in the pain, pain made greater with every single stab.

Something shattered.

The Keeper’s body buckled under them. Its scream faded to a dying gurgle. The body collapsed, the wearer of the Cowl with it.