“Three,” I repeated, slipping my shield back onto my arm. There was nothing we could do about a leviathan but get out before it reached the island.

I held the shield in front of me, my sword hanging to one side, as I rushed under the arch. I had the briefest glimpse of Bael before he launched a wave of fire. Unlike the other demons, he had retained a humanoid form. He actually looked better than the last time I’d seen him. No longer a fat, squat toad, he was now a tall, lean man with slick green skin. His eyes were bulbous yellow spheres, and his mouth opened in a too-wide slit as he uttered a guttural incantation.

Flames leapt from his hand, filling the space between us. The protective rune on my shield flared, and the barrier activated. It wouldn’t have been enough on its own, the burning wave was as tall as I was, but Astaroth was behind me, weaving magic of his own.

At a cry from the phoenix, the flames parted and died. I continued forward, but the Endermen outpaced me. Four distended shadows blinked into the room, their long-clawed hands reaching.

“No.” He said, his tone carrying the weight of his Presence. Even I felt the power behind it, a will as dense as the demon’s spirit, and faltered. Two of the Endermen stopped in their tracks, swaying as if they had been struck. The other pair blinked again, slicing and rending.

Long gashes opened along one of Bael’s bare muscular arms and across his chest. He struck one of the Endermen with a closed fist, and a chunk of the mob’s abdomen disappeared as if it had been smuggling a bomb that just went off. Shadowy flesh and violet blood splattered the surrounding chamber, and the Enderman collapsed.

I lunged, the point of my sword aimed for Bael’s throat, and he twisted to one side. The Enderman blinked around him again, talons raking across his back, and the demon’s throat expanded like a balloon with a rubbery, creaking sound. I wanted to slash open the balloon, but the other two Endermen turned on me, wrapping their long limbs around my shoulders and arms.

Astaroth shrieked, latching onto the back of one of my assailants, and buried his beak in the base of its skull. Steam rose from the point of contact, and I smelled burning plastic. They barked in anger, and as the grip on me weakened, I ripped free of the other, the Thorns of my armor tearing its hands apart, and slammed my shield into its broad, blank face.

As it skipped back, I saw Kevin. He was standing by the unfinished portal with empty hands. Caught either by indecision, or the wrong one. The wyverns were all dead, burned and crumpled.

A white-hot whip lashed my backplate, ringing against the orichalcum. I spun, and his next crack sparked against my shield barrier. Bael’s neck had grown to the size of a basketball, and when his mouth split, a wash of flame spilled out, expanding into a luciferous maelstrom.

The rune on my shield flared, then broke. Wooden planks fell away from my arm in charred chunks, along with the leather straps I had used to hold it. My heart bar flashed, but did not lower. Astaroth appeared in front of me, wings outstretched, and diverted the flames into a column that thrust through the hole in the ceiling into the floors above.

Bael’s whip wrapped around Astaroth’s slender neck and snapped him against the wall.

“NO.” He said again, and the Enderman that had been clawing him shuffled back with a pained grunt. The one that had been fighting me came in again, and I swiped through its leg with my gray-green sword. I hadn’t even looked. I could feel it.

“Finish the portal, Kevin.” I said, and out of the corner of my eye, I saw him finally start to move again.

Bael croaked, but all that came out was smoke. His whip struck like a viper, wrapping around my blade, and I let him have it, rushing forward and calling another dagger out of my inventory in the same instant. The atreanum glinted, and Bael raised his hand to protect his face. The dagger punched through his palm, and he twisted his wrist, snapping the blade while it was still sheathed in his flesh.

Instead of retaliating, he hopped to the portal and backhanded Kevin aside. His whip disintegrated, and a light shone in his uninjured hand, a ball of plasma too bright to look upon. He pressed the orb into the arch, speaking eldritch words, and hairline fractures raced across the obsidian structure. Half the portal crumbled as his spell raced up and down its length.

“Dick!” Kevin shouted, thrusting his own atreanum dagger into Bael’s lower back. The demon croaked, jumping away, but there were no more flames. He turned to face us, his already bulbous eyes nearly popping out of their sockets.

“You understand nothing.” He said. “Children playing a game you’ve already lost.”

“What does killing you with atreanum do here?” I asked. “Will it be permanent this time?”

He didn’t answer, and the ground rumbled with the approach of the leviathan. The entire tower was made of obsidian. We could craft another, if we had time.

My arrows were lost in the sands along with the first dagger, and the backup was ruined as well, though having the blade stuck in Bael’s palm was a worthy end for it. I was out of atreanum weapons, but Kevin still had his.

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Astaroth was still struggling to recover, he’d used too much energy, and the last Enderman seemed caught between two masters. It wasn’t attacking. So I tackled Bael.

Thorns dug into his skin as I grabbed him from behind, and they dug in deeper when he tried to throw me off. If he hadn’t already been stabbed, he might have been stronger than me, but I was able to bring his arms around his back and turn him toward Kevin.

The former Dark Lord did not have to be told what to do. He lunged forward, and drove his dagger into Bael’s abdomen. Then again, and again. I heard the blade snap when it hit breastbone on the third entry, but the damage had been done. Bael slumped in my grip.

“Too late,” he rumbled, blood leaking from his too-wide mouth. “Still too late.”

I dropped him and went outside.

The rip in reality had doubled in size, and a host of Endermen were busily worshiping the gap. It sounded like grinding glass. It was hard to gauge how fast the leviathan was moving, but it was even closer, and even bigger, than it had been moments before. It wouldn’t be able to swallow the island whole, but it could take a chunk out no problem, and my intuition suggested that it was coming right where we were, attracted by the scent of raw chaos in the air.

“I need more obsidian,” Kevin said, taking Durin’s Digger from where he had left it beside the portal. “But I think we’re good. There aren’t any more demons, are there?”

“No,” I said. “Just a leviathan.”

“A what!” He jogged out beside me, and lifted his visor. His mouth hung open. “Screw the portal. We’ve got to go now!”

“The wyverns are dead.”

“Don’t you have more rockets?”

I did. But they wouldn’t get us back to his base, so we would end up stuck on another random island, likely without access to more obsidian. Also, my Elytron was damaged from the ice and the fall.

Before I could bring it up, a familiar, birdlike trill interrupted us, and something heavy thumped onto the dune at our backs.

We turned, and were greeted by the sight of a wyvern almost twice the size of the ones we had rode in on. It’s dark beady eyes were tinged with green, and its maw gaped in a horrific imitation of a happy-to-see-me dog.

“Noivern!” Even if he hadn’t represented our salvation from inbound consumption, I would have been overjoyed to see him.

The wyvern bobbed its wide sharklike head.

“Get on,” I told Kevin, rushing back inside to quickly harvest my chest of materials and snap the viridian blade back on my belt.

“Can you fly?” I asked Astaroth.

“I can.” The phoenix was missing some feathers, and his flames had gone out, but he was on his feet.

Outside, Noivern was giving Kevin some trouble.

“Kneel,” he demanded. “What’s wrong with you?” The wyvern had shuffled aside when he went to mount him, and Kevin was easy to frustrate.

“I guess I should go first,” I said. “Noivern, chill.”

The massive monster trilled at me like a friendly cockatiel, and I hopped onto his broad back. He barely seemed to notice the extra weight.

“Can he carry both of us?” Kevin eyed the minimal seating area with skepticism. This was going to be tighter than sharing a motorcycle. His question was nearly lost beneath another sonorous call from the leviathan. The sand shivered under my boots..

“Get on, man. This island is about to get swallowed.”

Kevin obliged, and Noivern only hissed at him a little. Astaroth fluttered out of the tower, and with a bit of a running start, we lifted off into the void.

The Endermen ignored us, concerned only with the fractured space in the center of their crowd. As we rose higher, I saw that they were walking in droves from all across the island. They looked like lines of ants.

The leviathan rose above the island, its vast form taking up more and more of my vision. It was even less coherent now that it was closer. Much of its body was either covered in, if not composed of, a thick, sickly fog. There were no eyes that I could see, but it did have a mouth, a gaping hole that led to nothing but darkness.

It would have been better if it had teeth.

Noivern didn’t need to be told to fly faster. His wingbeats became more rapid, and he dove to increase our speed until we were skimming just above the dunes. We were already a mile from the void portal, but we weren’t out from under the leviathan. Its song vibrated in my armor, in my breastbone, growing so loud that I thought I might lose my ears.

Kevin shouted something. I couldn’t understand him. Sand was rising from the dunes, floating weightlessly, affected by the gravity of the beast. Its Presence was so intense that I was sure I would have felt it even without an aetheric sense, a physical pressure that pressed me down into Noivern. It was a miracle the wyvern could fly at all.

A line of light ahead of us. The land beyond its ever expanding shadow. The force of its being grew and grew, but we slipped from beneath the leviathan. The edge of the desert approached us, and Noivern took us out into true emptiness. It was at that point that the leviathan landed.

The sound was more than an avalanche, it was an entire mountain driving itself into the earth. I didn’t look back for long minutes, simply listening to the tumult and thunder behind us.

When I did look, we were far enough away that the true scale of the scene was less shocking. From a distance, with no proper frame of reference, it was possible not to be overwhelmed.

The island had fractured, chunks of its bedrock floating in disparate directions, much of the sands drifting freely in clouds. The great fish was swiping its tail as it twisted to gulp down more of the landmass, searching for any hint of the delicious chaos it had already swallowed.

We kept flying, and didn’t speak again until Kevin’s base was in sight.