My materials chest was already open beside the worktable, so a moment after Astaroth gave his warning, I was crafting atreanum. Even with a healthy amount of material to work with, the short blades were still the most efficient use of resources. Better reach would have been nice, but any actual sword fighting was out of the question with how easily they broke.
“How far?” I asked, pulling the worktable lever to combine a stick with a single atreanum coin.
“Beleth is nearest,” Astaroth lidded his eyes. “The other two lag behind. The manx is swift enough that he will arrive on the island in moments.”
I glanced back to Kevin, who had just finished clearing space for the portal. “You got all the blocks you need?”
“Don’t rush me,” he snapped, counting coins.
“I wasn’t—never mind. Take this,” I threw a dagger medallion at him and it bounced off his chestplate. He’d been too absorbed in his task to catch it. “It won’t take long,” he said, picking up the medallion. “You keep them out.”
Me fighting demons while Kevin constructed an escape hatch, what could go wrong? The alternative wasn’t much better.
“Don’t go through the portal without me,” I commanded, and he shrugged. The curse would delay him, at least. He still hadn’t jumped ship to side with the demons, so that was a good sign, though he could always do so after they arrived.
My viridian blade was clipped on my hip, there were only so many inventory slots to go around, and I preferred to keep atreanum weapons in the Storage Ring where they couldn’t be damaged accidentally. To start things off, however, I elected to go with the bow and a few of the remaining Shadowbane arrows. We used them more than the alternatives, and I would soon be left with Knockback and Flaming variants only.
“Can you keep the Endermen off of us or do I need to start killing them?” I asked Astaroth before downing a Fire Resist potion.
“I will push them back,” he said. “When the others are here, they will be too difficult to control.”
The phoenix whistled, and I heard coughs from around the tower. The lithe frames of the mobs flickered as they blinked away. The extra distance likely wouldn’t accomplish anything but buy us some time, but I took advantage of the clearance to step through the water and get a good look outside.
A mile away, a sandstorm had risen. It was rolling across the pale desert in a wave, heading directly for the tower. I didn’t need Astaroth to tell me that was Beleth’s doing. Raising my bow, I tried to find a target amid the whirl. A creature was leading the wave, flying fifty feet above the dunes. Too far and too obscured for me to make out many details, but the gray and black fur was a dead giveaway.
Like Astaroth, the demon no longer held a humanoid form. Beleth was all cat here. Behind me, Kevin was placing blocks, but it would be a few long minutes at least before he finished the portal, and the storm was fast approaching. The wyverns flew down from the peak of the tower, surrounding me protectively. As the Endermen were leaving us alone, I aimed, waiting for the demon to come close enough for a shot.
My first arrow was taken by the winds and cast harmlessly aside. Like Malphas, Beleth could protect himself from missile fire, and the Shadowbane enchantment was insufficient to break through his defenses.
Atreanum might be a different story. It was a costly experiment, one ingot yielded four arrows, and they were sure to shatter with use. But the demons had never seen me use them before, and if I got lucky, it would be worth it.
The sandstorm consumed the horizon, it was only two hundred yards away and closing fast. There were no Endermen in sight, and the wyverns were hissing angrily at the encroaching wave. They wouldn’t be able to fly in that mess.
I fired, and the arrow flew true. Beleth was the size of a leopard, and given that he was supermanning toward me, didn’t present much of a target. The demon didn’t try to dodge, expecting the winds to protect him, but the atreanum arrowhead cut through his magic as if it were dead air.
It struck his shoulder, and the cat demon’s yowl rose above the din of the storm. I felt his Presence shiver, and the wall of sand rushed forward, swallowing him, curving to slam into the tower from all directions.
Astaroth’s cry cut through the din, and he rose in a blaze of red-orange power. Flames materialized in the air above me, rolling out to meet the storm, and the phoenix dove into the cloud to hunt his counterpart.
“Get inside,” I commanded the wyverns, who were huddled against the onslaught of sand that was already rasping against my armor. Their eyes were slits as they crouched low to the ground, and they slipped under the water at my words. Astaroth could hold off Beleth, especially if I’d weakened him. We’d be gone before the other demons arrived.
As I moved to follow the wyverns, buffeted by wind and sand, the waterfall and the pool at the base of the tower coalesced into a mass of tubular limbs. They struck out as one, grasping and binding, ripping me off of my feet.
I kicked out as I jerked up, and my boots ruptured the limbs they touched. The Shadowbane runes that imbued them were useful for more than containing my corruption. It wasn’t enough to free me, however, and as the water pulled me up the side of the tower, tendrils sought to press through my visor to drown me.
My duel with Berith had taught me how to survive this. With an application of will, a burst from my own Presence, I prevented the encroaching water from forcing its way into my mouth and nose. My body and my being belonged to me, and the demon’s magic was not welcome within me.
It had to be Vepar. Astaroth had thought he was farther away, but demons could disguise their presence, and he could have used Beleth’s more dramatic approach to disguise his own. Should have picked up the source block, it was the perfect tool for a demon with a water affinity.
The waterfall rolled me up, all but immobilizing me. My bow dropped below, and I summoned an atreanum dagger. Living liquid retreated from the edge of the blade. Wherever I sliced, the water fell away, losing its animation even as the pressure on other parts of me increased. Vepar gripped me in a translucent fist, slamming me against the obsidian flank of the tower. My armor rang with the impact, but I kept hold of the dagger, slicing wildly to weaken his grip.
Where was he?
The sandstorm obscured my vision, lit here and there by flashes of lightning and flame. Shards of glass clinked against the tower, and my armor, like hail. Smashed against the tower once more, a wide slash from my blade severed the watery limb at its tree-trunk thick wrist, allowing me to fall.
Instead of drifting gently down on the wings of the elytron, I activated the rocket and sent myself shooting straight up. A new limb reached for me as I passed the peak of the tower, and a bucket materialized in my left hand. With a swipe, it consumed the source block resting on the obsidian ledge, but the limb still hit me, smothering the rocket and catching me in mid-flight.
Vepar was there, clinging to the steeple with a host of rubbery arms. A blue-gray squid the size of a pony, his pinkish eyes were bigger than my fists. Instead of trying to drown me again, his limbs wove a tapestry of arcane gestures, and the liquid around me crackled as it froze. The phase shift happened too quickly for me to dispel it with the dagger.
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I sliced up with the dagger, but I was caught, and a second later, only my blade and my boots were free.
“Survivor,” the demon’s voice sounded like squelching mud, “this is the end of your journey.”
Cold stung my skin, seeping through the orichalcum, as ice crept over my face mask. Though he couldn’t drown me directly, he could still cut off my air. It would be a slow, helpless death, suspended in an icicle stuck to the top of the tower.
I tried to move, to break free of the grip of the ice, and heard the pops as it fractured. Vepar, however, was not still. He continued his working, and his grip on me redoubled. I wasn’t strong enough to break free, and he could shape and reform the cage he had made for me at will.
My vision flashed white as a fireball struck the tower, blasting Vepar from his perch. The icicle broke, and I dropped like a barbell. The elytron couldn’t do anything to slow my descent while its wings were encased in ice. My heart bar flickered at the impact, but the frozen fist shattered as I hit the sand.
The storm washed over me, I couldn’t even see the entrance arch, and then I was struck by lightning.
The thunder was deafening, the heat searing, and the strike took me off my feet just as I had begun to rise. Astaroth had acted to save me, and his distraction had been enough to allow Beleth to attack.
More hearts gone. Half health, and mostly blind, I reached out with my Presence to find Beleth. The cat demon wasn’t far, and he was drawing fully on his power. His aura was strange, pulsing, but with an obvious wound, a dark spot in the electric brightness where he had been struck by an atreanum arrow.
Twitching nerves resisted my choice to run, but I forced my limbs to obey. Magic gathered around Beleth as he prepared another bolt. The last time we had fought, he had sought to capture me. He wasn’t bothering with that this time.
If I died here, his master could claim my soul.
I wasn’t going to reach him before his spell was finished. The winds were too strong, the distance too great.
I threw the dagger.
He dodged, but the fear of atreanum disrupted his spellcasting, and my boots surged across the shifting sand. Beleth leaped over me, carried by the wind, and I slid to a stop, pulling the viridium sword from my belt. I charged again, and he evaded me easily. Working completely off of my aetheric sense, all I actually saw of him was a dark blur amid the wash of sand.
Then a white-blue arc.
I barely avoided the crackling spell as it gouged a burning hole in the dune where I had been standing a moment before. It wasn’t as strong as the lightning that had struck me before, but I did not doubt that he could keep up this dance all day, or at least until Bael arrived.
Astaroth might or might not defeat Vepar on his own. Water probably trumped flame as affinities went. One slip from me and I would be shocked into submission. This had to end fast. An explosion reverberated from the top of the tower, was that Astaroth again? I couldn’t see what had happened and didn’t have time to worry about what the noise meant.
Beleth was toying with me, leaping directly overhead, high enough to be out of reach of my sword, and coming down at my back. I tried again, knowing I would never reach him, and as he lifted off the ground, I spun.
The Heart of the Hollow King appeared in my hand, summoned from the Storage Ring. Bitter purple light thrummed within its countless facets. The weird thing was, this fight felt like something out of a kung-fu movie training montage. Are you having trouble following your opponent's movement? Why not put on a blindfold?
I really could feel him, and I knew where he was about to be.
Do not drop. Thanks for the warning.
I threw it.
An arc of electricity cut through the sandstorm, followed by a bloom of awful light. A deep, resonant note rolled out from the point of impact, and I felt the world twist. My soul, Beleth’s Presence, I felt us both stretching, snapping, but he was closer to the epicenter than I was. For what felt like the tenth time in less than five minutes, I was knocked off my feet.
The sands were pushed outward, leaving a sphere of clear air within the cloud for a moment that extended unbearably as Beleth seemed to hang in suspension. The cat demon’s face was painted with almost comical surprise, and then the rip in reality sucked him in like an image reflected in water just before it went swirling down a drain.
The Heart of the Hollow King had broken, leaving behind what looked like a portal. Only this tear in reality wasn’t bounded by an obsidian frame. It was jagged, twitching hungrily. Wind died, and sand fell in sheets, nearly burying me. I got woozily to my feet, only a few hearts left in my health bar.
Astaroth and Vepar had paused in their contest a hundred yards away. The squid was protected by a shifting wall of ice, the dunes around him already scorched as the phoenix circled. Both were looking past me now, toward the wound in the world. Endermen, dozens of them, were flickering in from every direction. Their coughs were the loudest sounds in the silence left behind after the fracturing of the artifact. It would have been nice to use the Heart of the Hollow King in a recipe, but ending Beleth was a worthy use for the rare drop.
The viridium blade was only a few feet away. I picked it up.
The gap in the fabric of Bedlam was five feet wide, with fractal arms like a twisted snowflake, and getting wider. I shuffled away, back toward the tower. The lightning strike was catching up with me, my legs felt like jelly one moment and stiff as logs the next. A healing potion would have been appreciated. With a last jet of water at Astaroth, Vepar launched himself into the sky, swimming through the void as freely as one of the phantoms. Instead of going after him, Astaroth banked away from the jet and dove around to me.
“We have to go,” he said. “Immediately.”
“That’s not news to me.” I was ten seconds from reaching the arch, even at a snail’s pace. “Can you keep the Endermen back?”
“They will obey me,” he said. His feathers were ruffled, and his spirit felt worn and small in my aetheric sense, but he wasn’t done for yet.
The steeple of the tower was gone, and obsidian blocks littered the surrounding dunes. Astaroth’s blast hadn’t been that powerful. Through the arch, I could see Kevin standing before an almost-finished portal. His back was to me, and he wasn’t moving. Frozen by the curse? That didn’t make sense. He hadn’t betrayed me, and he couldn’t disobey my order not to leave me behind when the portal wasn’t even complete.
And where were the wyverns?
Astaroth screeched a warning, and instead of stepping under the arch, I lurched to one side of the opening on instinct.
Flames, rich red, hotter than any natural fire, poured out in a burning cataract. The near miss was uncomfortable, but the potion I had taken before the start of the battle did its job, and my health bar remained stable. One demon was gone, the other had fled. That left Bael.
“How are you, Mr. Toad?” I called, pressed against the obsidian wall beside the arch.
“Reborn, and with the favor of the One Who Knocks, more powerful than ever.” Had his voice always been so deep? It was like talking to Darth Vader.
“Was he that pleased that I killed you?”
“More pleased than you know.”
I had no idea what to say to that.
“Kevin,” I called. “How’s it going in there?”
“He won’t let us go. I can’t finish the portal. I’m…sorry.”
Kevin apologizing for something was leagues more surprising than Bael getting in our way. Astaroth flapped to my side. His affinity was the same as the toad demon’s. He was weaker than Bael, but he could still protect me, couldn’t he? At least long enough for me to give the older demon a dose of atreanum.
Most of the Endermen were standing around the tear left behind by the Heart of the Hollow King like they were having a religious experience. Some of them had their arms in the air, and most were swaying. One got too close and was dragged into raw chaos with a sound closer to laughter than I wanted to think about. Where did it lead to? Nowhere I wanted to go.
Four of the lanky mobs ignored the growing portal, instead blinking to join me and Astaroth at the side of the tower. He had them under control.
“Should I count to three or something?” I said in an undertone.
“Three,” Astaroth replied.
At the same moment, a new sound rolled across the island. It was vast, resonant, and oddly beautiful. It reminded me of whalesong.
I looked toward the source of the sound. Another island was fast approaching through the void, or not an island. A tremendous, green-gray mass, vaguely fishlike. It had a tail, and it was covered in hair that was actually probably tentacles thicker than my body.
So that was what leviathans looked like.